The future of drones – predators. No, not that one.

It is a sad fact of life that companies keep using the most useful terminology for things that don’t deserve it. The Apple retina display, which makes it more difficult to find a suitable name for direct retinal displays that use the retina directly. Why can’t they be the ones called retina displays? Or the LED TV, where the LEDs are typically just LED back-lighting for an LCD display. That makes it hard to name TVs where each pixel is actually an LED. Or the Predator drone, as definitely  not the topic of this blog, where I will talk about predator drones that attack other ones.

I have written several times now on the dangers of drones. My most recent scare was realizing the potential for small drones carrying high-powered lasers and using cloud based face recognition to identify valuable targets in a crowd and blind them, using something like a Raspberry Pi as the main controller. All of that could be done tomorrow with components easily purchased on the net. A while ago I blogged that the Predators and Reapers are not the ones you need to worry about, so much as the little ones which can attack you in swarms.

This morning I was again considering terrorist uses for the micro-drones we’re now seeing. A 5cm drone with a networked camera and control could carry a needle infected with Ebola or aids or carrying a drop of nerve toxin. A small swarm of tiny drones, each with a gram of explosive that detonates when it collides with a forehead, could kill as many people as a bomb.

We will soon have to defend against terrorist drones and the tiniest drones give the most effective terror per dollar so they are the most likely to be the threat. The solution is quite simple. and nature solved it a long time ago. Mosquitos and flies in my back garden get eaten by a range of predators. Frogs might get them if they come too close to the surface, but in the air, dragonflies are expert at catching them. Bats are good too. So to deal with threats from tiny drones, we could use predator drones to seek and destroy them. For bigger drones, we’d need bigger predators and for very big ones, conventional anti-aircraft weapons become useful. In most cases, catching them in nets would work well. Nets are very effective against rotors. The use of nets doesn’t need such sophisticated control systems and if the net can be held a reasonable distance from the predator, it won’t destroy it if the micro-drone explodes. With a little more precise control, spraying solidifying foam onto the target drone could also immobilize it and some foams could help disperse small explosions or contain their lethal payloads. Spiders also provide inspiration here, as many species wrap their victims in silk to immobilize them. A single predator could catch and immobilize many victims. Such a defense system ought to be feasible.

The main problem remains. What do we call predator drones now that the most useful name has been trademarked for a particular model?