Fractal Antenna Systems' DRONE BLASTR Drops Drones Out of the Sky — with Nothing But Sound
A combination of sonic, subsonic, and ultrasonic audio induce vibration in the drone, the company claims — resulting in "flight failure."
Fractal Antenna Systems has unveiled a device that it claims can drop a drone out of the sky with nothing but sound: the DRONE BLASTR cannon, based on acoustic resonance migration (ARM) technology.
"You can’t legally shoot a drone or zap it with microwaves outside military settings. Lasers are costly and affected by humidity. ARM offers an effective alternative for government and enterprise security," claims Fractal Antenna Systems chief executive officer Nathan Cohen, co-inventor of the technology. "The propellor blades become a driven oscillator from ARM, and even isolating the MEMS [Micro Electromechanical Systems] at the IMU [Inertial Measurement Unit] from these oscillations is impractical, especially in smaller drones. The result is flight disruption."
As Cohen says, most approaches for excluding drones from sensitive areas are inaccessible to most: there's the classic shoot-it-with-a-shotgun, never popular among your neighbors; there's hitting it with microwave energy or a high-power laser, which is expensive and power-hungry; there's attempting to catch it in a net, which is often comical; and there's attempting to jam the control signal, which will both get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) calling and provides no help for drones operating autonomously.
The DRONE BLASTR, though, works differently: it shouts the drone out of the sky, either using a smaller ARM unit attached to a drone of its own or a larger setup in a "cannon" arrangement to be used from the ground. An array of speakers emit a combination of sonic, ultrasonic, and subsonic sound waves directed towards the target drone — that, Cohen claims, induces vibrations severe enough to both induce turbulence and to disrupt onboard navigation systems without harming anything else. "ARM is designed to disable drones. And drones only," Cohen says. "This is not a system for crowd or animal control and we are not using inefficient, parametric arrays to achieve our spectrum."
Cohen has confirmed that devices based around the same principle are being demonstrated "by foreign groups," but that his company is beyond the "'prove out' phase" — though while he is encouraging "government, public safety agencies, and related enterprises" to contact the company for information on partnerships, no detailed timeline for commercialization had been provided at the time of writing.
