Watch: How to Trap And Capture A Drone

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

The more popular unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) become, the more of a nuisance can they be to some. Sometimes, they can even pose a danger. In January 2015, a hobbyist accidentally crashed his DJI Phantom quadcopter on the White House lawn. While in this case the was no harm intended, the incident demonstrated a vulnerability in current defences.

Two years prior, a UAV was flown towards German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a campaign rally. In this instance, too, an ill-meaning attacker could have achieved some disastrous results. Beyond the headlines, small drones have been used for malicious pranks, through spying, to smuggling – small flying machines in the wrong hands can pose a serious threat.

Mo Rastgaar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan Technological University, was watching the World Cup when he heard that snipers were protecting the crowd. “I thought, ‘If the threat is a drone, you really don’t want to shoot it down—it might contain explosives and blow up. What you want to do is catch it and get it out of there,’” he says.

So Rastgaar set out to create a system that works: a drone catcher that could pursue and capture rogue UAVs in the air.

The system is simple. A launcher shoots a big net attached to a large UAV. It can be autonomous, controlled by an operator, or a combination of the two. When a suspicious UAV is spotted, a catcher launches his net from a distance of over 12m. Due to the large size of the net and the speed of deployment, even the most manoeuvrable small UAV would struggle to escape.

As the video demonstrates, once caught, the rogue drone stands no chance. “It gets really entangled,” Rastgaar said. “It’s not going anywhere.”