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Drone vs Drone

In a follow-up to yesterday's column, it seems that those French droners have been at it again.

More reports flowed in last night of drones flying over landmarks in Paris and the police remain powerless to do anything.

For a moment it seemed as if they had nabbed the offenders when a group of three men were arrested with a drone in a woodland area near the French Capital but it turns out they were journalists attempting to try and find these rogue drones with one of their own.

However, the back-foot on which the French gendarmes find themselves has resulted in an interesting turn of events.

Apparently, the French authorities are now tendering for the delivery of anti-drone drones or systems that can detect and deflect or bring down such craft.

This is not the first time that anti-drone technology has been mooted or even developed.

There have been several kick-starter projects focused on drone detection but these have been nothing more than a joke. What's more, detection does not stop drones from flying in areas where they are not authorised to do so.

The Chinese and Americans have anti-drone laser technology that can shoot such a craft from the air -- so long as the laser can be deployed quickly enough to arrive before the drone has gone. These lasers are also very expensive and can result in the risk of injury on the ground if the drone falls into a populated area.

Other strategies might include the transmission of jamming signals on the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz bands... frequencies commonly used by recreational drones sold online and in hobby shops. This however, won't affect a drone which has a degree of autonomy.

Increasingly, the flight-controllers (onboard computers and navigation systems) used in these drones is capable of sustained autonomous flight. The operator can upload a sequence of way-points through which the craft will pass while flying a predefined course. Once launched, such a craft will operate without any further input from the ground and is thus immune to attempts to jam its control or camera links.

However, virtually all the autonomous modes rely on a strong GPS signal for establishing the craft's position and the correct heading required to reach the next way-point.

Disrupting the very weak GPS signal that fills the ether around us is a relatively trivial task and is perhaps a "must have" in any anti-drone arsenal.

Even better would be the ability to spoof the GPS signal, thus allowing such a craft to first be disconnected from its operator's RC signal (by way of a 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz jamming signal) then safely landed by fooling the craft into believing it was already hovering over its "return to launch" position.

Once recovered, forensic teams could dust for prints and there is a possibility that even serial numbers would provide useful links to the owners or operators. It has even been discovered that dim-witted operators have captured their own image on the attached camera before launching -- thus making tracking them down far easier than might otherwise be the case.

The prospect of an anti-drone drone however, is far more complex, more expensive and less likely to succeed.

I strongly suspect that the most cost-effective, practical and readily available anti-drone measure for authorities will be the tried and true shotgun loaded with a suitably sized wad of lead-shot. Of course the collateral damage may be undesirable (although falling lead shot is no more likely to kill anyone than a falling drone is).

I bet there are police forces all over the world who are thrilled to bits by the chance to do a little drone-skeet shooting or play with new gadgets, all in the name of preserving public safety from a perceived, but not yet realised, threat.

Should our authorities be gearing up to fight the onslaught of recreational drones that will inevitably appear in our skies sometime soon or should they have better things to do with their time and resources?

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