With the commercialization of drones and their accessibility to the public, there has become an increased issue of the public piloting their (gear) into places uninvited. Who recalls the Gatwick Airport Christmas chaos? Now, an Israeli defense tech company has unveiled an “anti-drone solution” that uses laser beams to shoot down flying drones from miles in the distance.
This new advancement is the latest in a series of efforts to produce anti-drone technology. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd, the company responsible, has produced a high-power laser beam to track and destroy drones mid-air. The video above, complete with dramatic music, was released in the last few days and demonstrates how the system uses coarse tracking (a wide angle view) and fine tracking (much more zoomed in) to keep tabs on a target. The Drone Dome can spot objects as small as 0.002 square meters from a distance of 3.5 km (2.1 miles).
In what the company describe as a “hard-kill,” the drones seen in the video are shot down from the sky, clearly fried by the laser. There’s even a “three-drone swarm” option, allowing users to take down multiple targets in quick succession.
It’s certainly a more viable option than when police in the Netherlands trained eagles to take down drones back in 2016.