When Michigan Technological University Professor Mo Rastgaar was watching World Cup soccer, he heard about snipers protecting the crowd from drones — not a good idea, he thought.
“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.’”
So Rastgaar, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, began work on a drone catcher, which could pursue and capture rogue drones that might threaten military installations, air traffic, or sporting events.
It’s a deceptively simple system, he says, explaining a launcher shoots a big net attached to a large drone by a string. The system can be autonomous, controlled by a ground-based human pilot or a combination of the two.
After an intruding drone is spotted, the drone catcher takes up the chase and fires the net at it from a distance of up to 40 feet. Because the net is so big and can be deployed so quickly, it can overwhelm even the fastest, most maneuverable small drone, he explains.
Once trapped, the intruder doesn’t have a chance, as illustrated in this video.
“It gets really entangled,” Rastgaar said. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Then the net swings down below the drone catcher, which ferries its cargo to a safe location.
“What makes this unique is that the net is attached to our catcher, so you can retrieve the rogue drone or drop it in a designated, secure area,” Rastgaar said. “It’s like robotic falconry.”
Other members of the team who worked on this project are Evandro Ficanha, a research engineer working with Rastgaar, PhD student Guilherme Ribeiro, and recent mechanical engineering graduates Ruiyu Kang and Dean Keithly.
Rastgaar and Ficanha have filed for a patent on this drone catcher system and think that it could have several potential applications, from foiling spy drones, smugglers and terrorists to supporting federal regulations.
“The FAA has just announced that drones must be registered, and we think the catcher could help enforce the law by catching unregistered drones,” he said.
Or catch registered UAV’s owners flying where they should not.
Would appear from the demonstration to be an ingenious invention but the target drone does appear by necessity to be hovering and not maneuvering making the capture fairly easy. What success would it have if the target was equipped as in the example with a camera to warn its operator of an approaching predator drone thus enabling the operator to maneuver the target drone away from the predator? I suspect, not much. A terrorist drone would likely not hover but rather bore in for an attack or simply explode on command upon being rendered inoperative or uncontrollable. I don’t put much stock in this as an effective counter measure to terrorist drones.