Sometimes low-tech options can end up being the most effective. Take, for example, this example of making use of eagles to take down rowdy drones.
In a new project to patrol the skies, the Dutch nationwide police has teamed up with ‘Guard from Above,’ a business that trains birds of prey to handle drones. They aim to produce a fleet of eagles that can fly to the skies and exploit drones that infringe air space or hamper official operations such as emergency situation air ambulance landings. According to Guard from Above, the objective is to make use of the bird’s “searching instincts” making them hound drones.
A video released on Sunday on the Dutch cops’s official YouTube channel shows an eagle making a beeline for a drone and getting it from above, prior to sticking it in the corner of an indoor training center.
“The eagle sees the drone as its victim, so he aims to take it to a safe location and guard it as soon as he gets there,” states Sjoerd Hoogendoorn from Guard from Above in the video.
As drone operators can commonly be occluded from view, it’s not constantly easy to find their whereabouts and reprimand them in situ. According to the Dutch cops’s press release, the authorities are therefore looking for electronic options, like “remotely taking control of the os [of the drone], however also ‘physical’ options to stop undesirable drone use.”.
In this case, specifically trained eagles deceived into thinking that drones are prey.
Eagles and other attack birds have actually shown helpful in other technological missions. For instance, European Area Company researchers in Spain use falcons to protect deep area antennas.
The Dutch authorities are currently only checking out whether using birds of prey is the very best type of taking on drones. They’ll decide in a couple of months if having a fleet of eagle patrollers is certainly the finest approach of implementing some law and order in the skies.
