Drones’ self defence – As delivery drones multiply, they may need to protect themselves

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Porch piracy is a problem that may be solved by the spread of parcel-delivering drones.
Because each drone delivery involves a separate journey, rather than having to be fitted into a round, it will be easier for courier and customer to agree on when a drone should arrive than on the arrival time of a van.
However Nirupam Roy and Nakul Garg, a pair of engineers at the University of Maryland, worry that drone deliveries are open to a different sort of piracy—hijacking.
A drone in flight is easily upset.
High-flying drones, like those employed by the police for surveillance, will normally be out of range of such activity.
But parcel drones will have to fly low, at least for part of their journeys.
To counter this risk the pair therefore propose to build a lightweight, low-power self-defence mechanism which lets a drone sense a missile fast enough to get out of its way.
Drones are lean machines, provided with only enough battery strength, computing power and payload-carrying capacity to do the job they are designed for.
Dr Roy and Mr Garg think, however, that they have hit on a low-power, lightweight self-defence system suitable for small drones.
To take advantage of it Dr Roy and Mr Garg plan to fit drones with diminutive loudspeakers, like those found in smartphones.
These would broadcast an ultrasonic tone outward from the drone.
The Doppler shift of these reflections, run through a bit of on-board processing (but far less than that needed for radar or lidar) would give the bearing of the threat, and thus permit the drone to take evasive action.
To test the principle of what they call their DopplerDodge drone defence system, Dr Roy and Mr Garg have constructed a static version in their laboratory, and have been throwing objects of various sizes and shapes at it, as if it were a hovering drone.
That is pretty close, but would still give a drone a tenth of a second’s notice of an incoming missile

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AutoTextExtraction by Working BoT using SmartNews 1.02976805238 Build 26 Aug 2019