For years, companies have struggled to find ways to safely turn off drones (and sometimes not) by doing things they shouldn’t do-whether they fly too close to the crowd or send contraband into prison. The key word there is “security”. Today, there are many ways to turn off drones, but most methods are not safe and may cause confusion for legal drone pilots flying legally.
However, perhaps the most dangerous is the cheap gps jammer that can be purchased online from websites-illegal in many parts of the world. These devices cost only $20, and they interfere with the GPS signal reaching your drone, so they don’t know where it is, and they may fall from the sky. But there is a solution.
The reason these GPS jammers cause such problems is that many drones (especially professional-grade commercial drones) usually have some kind of GPS homing system built into their firmware. For example, if you lose the signal between the drone and the controller, the drone will turn around and fly back in the direction it started, hoping that the signal can be restored or the drone can perform certain operations to land safely The battery may run out in front of the drone.
It relies on GPS to know where it is and where it is going. However, as demonstrated by the drone light show carefully planned in Hong Kong in 2017, if drones lose their GPS signals without knowing their location, they can usually fall out of the sky no matter where they are. Come down. In this case, 46 drones fell to the ground at an estimated cost of HK$1,000,000.
However, there are some potential defense mechanisms for commercial drone pilots in legal flight. ZDNet specifically emphasizes the InfiniDome GPSdome example, which uses a “unique interference filter system” to minimize interference signals. It can combine the pattern from multiple antennas in real time to determine what is the real signal and what is noise (or deliberate interference) in order to clean up the signal and make the drone fly and know its location.
Basically, this idea sounds a lot like why many of us use balanced XLR cables for audio processing (simplified explanation) essentially using signal pairs to maximize the signal quality between the microphone and the microphone connected to it, and suppress noise and Suppress interference. Although the process is not exactly the same, it is much easier to compare two separate signals to see signals that shouldn’t exist.
In fact, toolkits like GPSdome can work, but they also increase the cost of rigs to protect yourself from things that are already illegal in most countries in the world. Hopefully, at some point, commercial and high-end drone manufacturers will implement it as a standard for drones.
If eagles and unmanned bullet guns are not enough to be worrying, now anyone can shut down your drone-even if you break the law in the process.