The ‘gun’ serves as a jamming device to safely shut down drones flying illegally.
How best to deal with the influx of drones into our skies remains a question that is being heavily debated.
Legislation and regulation on when and where drones can be flown are constantly being updated as pilots and regulators learn more with each flight.
Elsewhere, a range of other techniques – including signal black spots (known as geo-fencing) – have been suggested as ways to control drones better. Now one firm in the US has come up with another solution.
It looks like a weapon from an 80s sci-fi movie, but the DroneGun is understood to work fairly simply in that it blocks the radio signal the craft is using to communicate with its operator. In most instances, when this happens drones have failsafes that mean they return to their point of origin or land immediately.
However, jamming devices are actually banned in the US, so it wouldn’t yet be legal to use the DroneGun.
That’s not to say regulations won’t change – as already mentioned this is constantly happening in the drone industry, and with increasing issues concerning drones and their use as smuggling vehicles, using such a device in the future might not be quite as unlikely.
