According to a recent Goldman Sachs report, consumer spending on drones will likely total around $17 billion worldwide by 2020. That’s a whole lot of drones, with virtually no oversight to stop them from being misused. Recent incidents such as the one in which a drone brought one of the U.K.’s biggest airports to a screeching standstill highlight the glaring vulnerabilities that exist in this space. Drones represent the ultimate tool for asymmetric guerrilla warfare, capable of letting single bad actors confound much larger, more sophisticated organizations.
“This is only the beginning,” Noam Kenig, CEO of drone-oriented defense company AerialX, told Digital Trends. “As drones get more portable and available, there’s a real risk of people using them for harm. You need some way to take them down.”
The magic bullet – AerialX, a six-year-old company based in Vancouver, Canada, believes that it’s come up with a magic bullet to stop incidents like this. Literally. Drawing on its expertise in areas like machine vision and unmanned aircraft, and combining that with its contacts in the defense world, AerialX has created a patent-pending solution called the DroneBullet.
The DroneBullet is described by Kenig as a “hybrid between a missile and a quadcopter.” It is, in essence, a kamikaze drone which looks like a miniature missile, but boasts the maneuverability of a quadcopter. With a takeoff weight of 910 grams, this pocket rocket has a four kilometer range and is able to reach speeds of up to 350 kilometers-per-hour in a dive attack. It’s designed to lock onto enemy drones and then doggedly pursue them; ultimately crashing into them and knocking them out of the sky.
Related Link:
AerialX Drone Forensics Inc.