Rapere Intercept Drone | Hacker News Reader

Rapere Intercept Drone

rapere.io

57 pointspavel_lishin48 comments

I wonder if projects like this will trigger the development of drone countermeasures, leading to an interesting arms race and regular battles in the skies above us.

we are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_in_World_War_I#The_daw...

I wonder if you could just create some kind of roof over the rotors, thus negating the "attack".

What exactly do you think is the point of helicopter rotors?

Not that.

To generate lift. It's most certainly not to shield the helicopter from attacks from above.

Exactly. How do you imagine rotors generating lift when enclosed by a roof?

Something as basic as a wire mesh would fit the bill.

It probably wouldn't, when the rotor has incredible suction and the tangle wire is very thin. I would certainly expect an attacker using monofilament and a defender using several-mm mesh to go the way of the attacker. Too much protection and you lose the airflow.

I must immediately tape speaker mesh to my AR drone! FOR SCIENCE!

Yeah, I'm not aerospace engineer, but couldn't you just put the roof like 10 cm above the rotors so it has enough air flow?

... but then someone else would invent balloons filled with mylar pieces that can saturate the area around the props.

If you're legally allowed to destroy a drone on your property, then instead of using another drone why not just use a shotgun?

Right now you can't : http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/10/03/new_jerse...

shotgun is a bit overkill for sub/urban environments, although i agree it would be especially effective. i've never shot clay before and i was able to hit multiple times on my first clay outing.

however i imagine it would be no more than a weekend job to design a net-firing sabot or perhaps some kind of plastic scatter shot that could launch out of a t-shirt cannon.

In Jersey, one of the worst states for private firearms ownership in the country.

"Unlawful weapons" isn't a crime in the vast majority of free states (excluding NFA items and the like.)

Almost across the state Jersey municipalities have no discharge laws preventing from shooting on your property so this is more about discharging a firearm than drones. Now if you had some type of EMP device that wasn't covered under firearm laws...

The issue is that there is no defined elevation above land you own that is designated part of your property.

My understanding (from an undergraduate US law class) is that you actually own the column defined by your property lines up into the heavens (and down into the Earth). You implicitly grant an easement (a formalized privilege allowing someone else do something with your property) to aircraft and other things like that. I imagine that this easement doesn't extend to drones doing something they're not supposed to.

Slate: How much of the airspace above your home do you own? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

I wouldn't feel comfortable using a shotgun. I'd use one of those net throwing guns instead.

How have birds evolved to handle this?

If you're a small bird, try not to be seen and spend most of your time in areas cluttered by trees and other object to exploit your size and maneuverability. If you're a big bird, spot your targets from distance and strike at high speed.

Destruction of property is destruction of property. The logic behind this seems to imply that you could legally take steps to crash a manned helicopter merely because it was flying over your property. That is almost certainly not the case.

Another example: Some of the wealthiest people in California live on a street called La Jolla Farms Rd. (supermarket magnate Ron Burkle owns a 58,000 sq ft home there). One of the hallmarks of living on this street is that hang and paragliders taking off from the La Jolla Gliderport fly over these homes constantly during the day - many with cameras. Would it be legal to take any of them down? My guess is you would be charged with attempted murder.

Hot air balloons frequently fly over Rancho Santa Fe nearby, as well. Local ordinances are such that most if not all of them are doing so illegally, if I recall correctly, but that still doesn't mean shooting them down would be legal.

Private property owners generally only have airspace rights in so far as "enjoyment". That, is they can shoot fireworks, have balloons, loft their own drones, etc.

Unless a pilot of an aircaft (including balloons, etc) is somehow being intentionally disruptive (e.g., hovering their helicopter over an ex-girlfriend's birthday party), they have a higher obligation to safe flight. And if that means overflying Coral Reef Ranch, Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer's show ponies are just going to have to deal with it.

I feel there is a large difference between disabling a drone, and killing a human being. That's a bit of a disingenuous argument in my opinion.

My point was that I can guarantee that the law doesn't make that distinction - maybe it will in the future, but not today. Taking out flying objects is illegal.

Is this a joke? There have to easier ways than physically dropping a string into a rotor.

They are radio controlled. A handful of parts from radioshack, or even just an injection-capable wifi dongle, and they will drop from the sky without you leaving the ground.

That strategy almost certainly has a vastly different legal status compared to the original article's.

> A handful of parts from radioshack, or even just an injection-capable wifi dongle, and they will drop from the sky without you leaving the ground.

Jamming RC control is not that straightforward, and for good reasons: it's common for several pilots to operate RC-controlled vehicles from single airfield simultaneously, thus RC radios evolved to avoid interference with one another.

While modern RC radios indeed usually operate on 2.4GHz band common with WiFi, they typically employ frequency-hopping spread-spectrum communications[1] that has nothing to do with WiFi and is designed with degree of robustness against interference.

Secondly, many `drones' (in this context, quad-rotors and multi-rotors) are catable of semi-autonomous operations, such as position holding, following a pre-planned flight path, and automatic return-to-base, as both aide to pilot and a natural protection against losing radio contact with the remote control.

To combat those capabilities you would have to jam GPS signal too, and most probably the end result would be drone simply drifting with wind and slowly changing altitude, instead of dropping out of the sky right away. Not to mention jamming nearby neighbours and motorists, and illegality of such jamming [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-controlled_aircraft#Freq...

[2] http://www.gps.gov/spectrum/jamming/

Indeed, my Parrot has a preprogrammed behaviour in case of loss of signal: cease lateral movement and descend to hover until signal is reacquired (or the battery runs low, in which case land). If it were flying waypoints, it'd ignore the jamming as it ignores signal loss - and part of the fun flying waypoints is sending Mr Crashy out of direct control for a short time.

Jamming's a fantasy attack just like shotguns are.

> automatic return-to-base

Automatic return to base is an interesting outcome if you want to catch the drone's owner..

Like what? This is a pretty neat way to bring down the target while being able to apprehend the device. A lot of modern RPVs have crash landing software. doesn't keep it air worthy, but it can soften the descent. Also, in terms of splash damage, it is very precise. I imagine ECM attacks would radiate outward in an irresponsible way, causing non-targeted devices to fail.

A fun aside: there were a number of secret programs that studied the weaponizing of the Apollo space program, should it come down to a shooting war. Instead of lasers, missiles, or bass cannons, their weapon of choice was black spraypaint. The concept was to approach and rendezvous with the target craft and cover the surface with black paint. After a certain percentage of the craft's surface area is blacked, the life support system in the target aircraft would be incapable of keeping the inhabitants alive.

Another parallel could be drawn from the current Sino-Russo-American satellite shadowing that has been developed for the past few years.

I thought about making an anti-drone drone that would basically fly in front of another drone and release a fine spray of some sort of air-hardening resin which should foul control surfaces and mechanical parts.

Haven't done it yet.

I'm curious if a microwave's magnetron strapped to the pursuit drone could act as a poor man's Active Denial System and fry the other drone.

Serious practical problems:

1. Weight of the magetron, battery, and power supply to power the magnetron.

2. Shielding required on the aggressor drone to prevent it from frying itself.

Whoa, that's an unfortunate name.

I can't think of many that would be worse.

I assume its named after the sword

That's the same strange attitude that got a man fired from DC gov't for using the word "niggardly."

If your sensitivity is such that you can't handle similarities in word sounds I recommend you lock yourself indoors cause it's a tough world out there.

I don't know where this name came from, but it made me think of Latin rapere, "to snatch/grab/carry off", which is the etymological source of "rape" and, while a common word, was also used for somewhat related purposes in Roman times (namely, kidnapping women). This is unlike niggardly, which is etymologically unrelated to nigger. However, rapere is also the source for innocuous English terms like rapt and rapture.

The word "rape" didn't even remotely cross my mind until you mentioned it here. The name actually reminded me of a rapier, a kind of weapon.

"rapier" is what I thought, as well; the rapier is a light thrusting sword, which is intended to deliver a quick wounding strike to the target. Seemed perfectly on-point for this drone.

To be perfectly clear, I did a double-take because I mis-read it the first time, I'm probably not alone on this, and I'd consider it an ill-advised name.

You could consider me oversensitive, but would you choose Niggardly for a brand name?

Niggard Systems: a company devoted to conserving capital resources through a proactive approach towards analytics and trends in money markets.

I understand you may disagree with them, but there's no need for an ad-hominem attack. I like to believe our community is above that, even as a lurker. Instead, why do you disagree with the assertion that its an unfortunate name?

(It appears @comex gave a pretty convincing argument for why it is at this level in the thread, and I know I read the name wrong at first!)

quick edit: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/rapere isn't looking too good, either.

That was actually what the F22 was going to be named.

It's "Rap er uh", not "rape er e".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com