Polish Startup Aims for Anti-Drone Market

A Polish startup is banking on the success of the anti-drone industry to jump-start their latest product.

High+Mighty has unveiled SKYNET, a double-barreled drone zapper that uses radio waves to interfere with a drone’s GPS and can order the aircraft to either gently land at whatever point it’s “shot,” or return to its owner.

“It works by interfering with GPS frequency at a control frequency 2.4 Ghz with high power impulse,” said company spokesperson Krzysztof Bugajski.

The device is assembled in Poland but manufactured in Taiwan and Bugajski says it is only available to “police, military and government services.”

Bugajski claims that Skynet boasts several advantages over current anti-drone solutions on the market. Anti-drone UAVs loaded with nets or other payloads are heavier and can be easily outrun by smaller drones while “net-parachute rifles” require reloading, he said. He adds that zappers or net drones can cause their drone victims to plummet to the earth, resulting in possible property damage to anything below.

A company fact sheet states that the anti-drone rifle is effective up to 2 km and is powered from a lithium-ion battery which will fuel about two hours of constant use.

Skynet joins a market full of new products tasked with disabling errant drones.

For example, DroneShield uses acoustic technology to detect incoming drones from up to 150 yards and sends e-mails or text messages to a monitoring service. The company deployed detectors at the2015 and 2016 Boston Marathon.

The FAA recently partnered with the Anti-UAV Defense System (AUDS) – a team of British anti-drone companies that includes Blighter Surveillance Systems, Chess Dynamics and Enterprise Control Systems. AUDs will join with American company Liteye Systems as “the world’s first fully integrated detect-track-disrupt-defeat” drone defense system. The partnership is one piece of the FAA’s Pathfinder Initiative which is designed, the agency says, to address three areas of national drone integration – “visual line-of-sight operations in urban areas, extended visual line-of-sight operations in rural areas [and] beyond visual line-of-sight in rural/isolated areas.”

A recent study predicts the anti-drone market will to grow into a billion-dollar industry within six years with predicted compound annual growth rate of 23.89 percent across 2017-22.