In a world where consumer drones are becoming increasingly popular, the potential threat they pose is a growing concern for municipalities and governments. Dr. Lael Alexander, a developer of drone deterrent systems, spoke with Marlo Anderson at CES 2023 about the importance of being prepared for such threats.
Dr. Alexander explained that the obstacle of humans not being able to affect anything above 14 feet is a problem when it comes to dealing with drones dropping harmful payloads. That’s where the mobile assault directional antenna comes in. By shooting a directional frequency array, the drone can be discombobulated and sent into safe mode, allowing authorities to take control of it and bring it safely down to the ground.
This technology, which is almost military grade, has been extensively tested and is set to become a valuable asset for arenas, stadiums, public places, large events, and schools. While currently primarily aimed at municipalities and government agencies, Dr. Alexander says the technology could eventually become available to the public.
The threat of drones dropping harmful substances is a real concern, and being prepared for such an event is crucial. Dr. Alexander and his team are leading the charge in developing technology that will help protect people from these potentially dangerous devices.
Transcript
Imagine you’re at a Monte Gras and a consumer drone flies overhead, and this little powder drops into the crowd and it’s anthrax. Who do you call the firefighters police officer? Proper out anthrax busters. Like Ghostbusters. Seriously? Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. The reason why this is important for municipalities to actually pay attention to this is because these are the threats that companies like ours are helping you face in the near future, because you can’t fight tomorrow’s threats with yesterday’s.
The obstacle of a human or the thing that is a problem for a human is the fact that they can’t affect anything above 14 feet. That means you can’t shoot water at it. You can’t throw something at it. It’s coming at you at 60 miles an hour, and it can fly as high as two miles up in the air after it’s already dropped this payload.
So how do you go after that person? You have to develop your mobile assault. So this mobile assault directional antenna allows us to go ahead and discombobulate a drone. We shoot a directional frequency array that spans out about 180 degree at, its, at, its the end of its nose cone.
We have, we also have a laser. With digital Zoom so that you can identify the drone, and just point and push in that direction, and the drone will go to safe mode. Literally the controller of the drone has no further control of the drone once it’s interfacing. So when it goes to safe mode, what happens to the drone at that time?
Does it just go home or just drop out of the spot? It does not go home. The safe mode right now brings the drone straight down. Straight down, and it has to avoid obstacles on the way down. So there’s the safer way to do it. A lot of other drone de deterrent systems either have a netting projectile solution or something like that, but what you’ve just eliminated was something that actually caused another problem, because if it had a pay.
Say it was carrying a bomb or anthrax, and now it’s falling outta the sky. You have a rock falling outta the sky on something that you can’t protect, right? So our idea was to first connect with frequency diffuse the frequency of the controller, and then our further attempts of drone deterrence was taking in a step.
Now I can detect the drone in our airspace, and by frequency augmentation, we can actually now take control of it. So does this actually send some type of warning to your smart device or whatever that allows you to know that there’s a drone in the vicinity that then you can take action to? How does this work?
So this this is like an awash for drones. So it’s early. Ordinance detection, right? So you actually, this is almost military grade, right? The way that you would build one of those domes, this is what this was built for. We’ve done tremendous amount of studies around the wind and the air that was created around those drones because they put off a different signature than that of a bird.
So it was a tremendous amount of study. We find that this is gonna be the apparatus that will assist in arenas, stadiums, public places large events schools, you name it. Any place that had a designated no-fly space requires this, is this reasonable enough that people could purchase for themselves too, or is this basically for government’s, municipalities, that type of thing?
Most of the, most of this level. Equipment is built for municipalities minor governments fms, if you will, foreign military services. And they’ll get the, they’ll get the bigger. They’ll get the bigger value out of it right now, but it is also a trickle down value to the citizen if they have that in space.
This is your Guru of Geek Marlo Anderson coming to you from CES 2023.
