Copping a copter | The Economist

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Dealing with rogue drones

Copping a copter
In the hands of criminals, small drones could be a menace. Now is the time to think
about how to detect them and knock them down safely

May 2nd 2015 | From the print edition

ON APRIL 22nd a drone carrying radioactive sand
landed on the roof of the Japanese prime ministers
office in Tokyo. It was the latest of a string of
incidents around the world involving small drones.
Last year more than a dozen French nuclear plants
were buzzed by them. In January one crashed on the
White House lawn. In February and early March
several were spotted hovering near the Eiffel tower
and other Parisian landmarks. Later in March someone attempted to fly one full of drugs (and also a
screwdriver and a mobile phone) into a British prison. The employment of drones for nefarious, or
potentially nefarious, purposes thus seems to have begun in earnest. It is only a matter of time
before somebody attempts to use a drone, perhaps carrying an explosive payload, to cause serious
damage or injury. The question for the authorities is how to try to stop this happening.
The French government is already taking the issue seriously. In March, it held trials of anti-drone
detect and defeat systems. These trials used two sorts of drone as targets. One was fixed-wing
aeroplanes with a wingspan of up to two metres. The other sort was quadcoptersminiature
helicopters that have four sets of rotors, one at each corner, for stability. The results have yet to be
reported.
Detecting a small drone is not easy. Such drones are slow-moving and often low-flying, which
makes it awkward for radar to pick them up, especially in the clutter of a busy urban environment.
Defeating a detected drone is similarly fraught with difficulty. You might be able to jam its control
signals, to direct another drone to catch or ram it, or to trace its control signals to find its operator
and then defeat him instead. But all of this would need to take place, as far as possible, without
disrupting local Wi-Fi systems (drones are often controlled by Wi-Fi), and it would certainly have to
avoid any risk of injuring innocent bystanders.
Bringing down quads
One company which thinks itself up to fulfilling the detection part of the process is DroneShield, in
Washington, DC. This firm was founded by John Franklin and Brian Hearing after Mr Franklin
crashed a drone he was flying into his neighbours garden by accident, without them noticing. He

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realised then how easily drones could be used to invade peoples privacy and how much demand
there might be for a system that could warn of their approach.
DroneShields system is centred on a sophisticated listening device that is able to detect, identify
and locate an incoming drone based on the sound it makes. The system runs every sound it hears
through a sonic library, which contains all the noises that are made by different types of drone. If
it finds a match, it passes the detected drones identity and bearing to a human operator, who can
then take whatever action is appropriate.
Other ways of detecting drones are also under investigation. Despite the shortcomings of radar,
Blighter Surveillance Systems, based near Cambridge, Britain, is having a go. Conventional radars,
which search for things by looking for shifts of position, are not good at spotting slow-moving
objects like drones. Blighters approach, based on a radar developed to spot human intruders who
are crawling along the ground to evade detection, employs the Doppler effect instead. It can tell how
fast, and in which direction, something is moving by comparing the frequency of the radar beam it
emits with that of any reflection it receives. The Doppler effect means the beams frequency rises
when it bounces off an approaching object and falls when it returns from a receding one. Once the
radar notices something moving, it passes the information to a human operator who can take a look
with a camera or (if it is night time) a thermal-imaging device, to determine whether the object is a
drone or a bird.
Detecting an incoming drone, then, seems possible. But that does not solve the problem of what to
do when you find one. You could try to jam its controls in any of several ways. A crude but effective
one is to flood the radio frequency the drone is operating onor even the entire radio
spectrumwith a signal of high enough power to cancel out the drones control signal and cause it
to crash. Such a crash, though, would be uncontrolled and so might result in damage or injury.
Moreover, a spectrum-wide jamming signal could do a lot of other harm.
A more sophisticated approach, drone spoofing, involves the spoofer sending fake GPS signals
specifically to the drone. If these are more powerful than the real thing, they can be used to feed
false navigation information to the drones computer, causing the craft to change course or crash in
a place of the spoofers choice. Surprisingly, no one seems to be developing this commercially as a
drone defence (at least, no one is admitting publicly to doing so).
An even cleverer idea is to hijack not just a drones navigation but its entire control system. One
person working on this is Samy Kamkar, a security researcher famous in computer-hacking circles
for devising, in 2005, the fastest-spreading worm program of all time (within 20 hours of its release
it had inserted the text but most of all, samy is my hero into the MySpace profile pages of 1m
people). SkyJack, the result of Mr Kamkars drone-related deliberations, subverts the controls of
one of the most popular sorts of drone, the Parrot quadcopter, of which more than 700,000 have
been sold.
SkyJack is itself a drone. It is a Parrot modified by the addition of a specially programmed
Raspberry Pi (a commonly available miniature computer), a battery and two wireless transmitters.
It seeks the signals of any other Parrot in the neighbourhood and hijacks that drones wireless

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connection by issuing a command to disconnect from the device controlling it. This creates what Mr
Kamkar calls a zombie drone. The hijacker can then fly the zombie wherever he wishes, and also
watch its video feed.
If a target drones controls prove unsubvertible, though, it may be necessary to apply brute force. A
shotgun or a rifle can be effective against a drone (indeed, the richer sort of sports shooters are
starting to use drones as an alternative to clay pigeons). But shooting drones down, or knocking
them out of the sky with interceptor killer drones (which has also been tried) comes up, once
more, against the problem that you do not know where a disabled drone is going to land.
Net benefits
An alternative is to try to catch and retrieve
the target. That is the approach adopted by
Malou Tech, a Parisian firm. Malous
hexacopter, the MP200, can be fitted with a
dangling net that entangles its prey (see
photograph) and brings it back for
examination. Doing this requires a skilful
ground controller, but Malou has set up a
drone school to train people in the art.
Even better, though, would be to retrieve the
human operator behind a droneand that is
what ECA Robotics, in Toulon, is trying to
do. Once its drone, the IT180, has located a
rogue device, transponders on it can track
the intruders control signal back to a source
up to 700 metres away, which the drone then
photographs. This means that even if the
operator is able to make a getaway, there will
still be evidence that may identify him and
which can be used in court if he is
prosecuted.

Gotcha!

Whether any or all of these ideas will prove

good enough to set up real air defences against drones remains to be seen. But the only other
approach on offer at the moment is to create areas of restricted airspace around obvious targets and
require manufacturers to incorporate them into the software of commercial drones as prohibited
GPS locations. That hardly seems likely to deter a determined adversary. So far, prison-smuggling
aside, the irregular use of drones seems to have been intended mainly to carry out slightly anarchic
protests. Sooner or later a drone will be used for something more sinister.

From the print edition: Science and technology

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