Vortex Cannon vs Drone

Hiding inside this box is an absolute marvel of engineering.

You might just find protecting you the next time you're at a public event.

That's got a lot of people.

And while this just

might look like a boring old drone, it's actually one of the fastest in the world.

It's autonomous, and it weighs five times more than is typical

because the purpose of this drone is to lock onto a bad guy drone

trying to do bad guy things and then smash it into a thousand pieces.

Now the drones have become so incredibly cheap, fast, and maneuverable.

It's only a matter of time before they're used to carry explosives,

to attack key infrastructure, or even worse.

But before we get too worried, there's some good news here.

And so today we're going to take a look at all the latest technologies being

developed to combat this very possible scenario.

And then after we see how the pros are doing it

we’ll investigate how a few backyard YouTube engineers would handle the same problem.

And I don't want to give too much away, but it might involve giant dart

turrets, Tesla coil water guns, and the world's largest vortex cannon.

Now to kick things off with the pros.

I headed down to a company called Anduril, who were one of the leaders

when it comes to drone defense, where I met up with their founder,

Palmer Luckey,

who, by the way,

you might recognize is the dude who dropped out of school

at 19 years old to invent the Oculus VR headset.

And right out of the gate, he set the stage.

The United States has the ability to defend against,

fighter jet attacks or bomber invasions and zero ability to control

what happens in the first few hundred feet of our airspace.

That's the thing we have to solve. We have to tame the Wild West.

Palmer explained to me there are six primary ways to take out a drone with bad intentions,

and every method has a major flaw except for number six.

The first is jamming, where you

just overwhelm the drone with fake radio signals

so it can no longer hear the instructions

from the human operator, and they lose control.

70% of all consumer drones are from DJI, and they actually provide the equipment

to law enforcement that will jam the communications like this.

The second method to take out a drone with bad intentions is hack it,

where you remotely hack into the drone using the radio signal,

and then by exploiting known problems in the software, you could take control

and force it to land or crash.

But Palmer pointed out

the potential Achilles heel for both of these first two methods.

All they have to do to bypass that is use a different brand of drone,

use different brand of radio, use a different frequency,

or build a drone that doesn't even need those frequencies in the first place.

Basically, by using something besides the most popular

consumer, drones and frequencies means this would have no effect.

Method number three

is high powered lasers, where you basically just heat up

the outside surface of the drone so high that it catches fire.

And this works pretty well against plastic drone casings.

But once again, there's a weakness.

what if I just hang a five cent pie tin?

Yeah

It takes orders of magnitude more energy to burn through a

metal reflective pie tin,

it just doesnt work.

The next method is a focused beam of microwave energy, like an EMP.

The goal here is to induce a current in the drone electronics so high

that it fries the brain of the drone, but as Palmer explained,

all a bad guy has to do to mitigate this is to buy some cheap copper tape

from Home Depot, and once you cover the body of the drone,

it becomes practically invisible to this attack.

You can reduce the amount of power that gets to the internal electronics

from an EMP by orders of magnitude, and that means a microwave beam gun

that was previously able to fry a drone at 2000m away now

only works if that copper taped drone is two meters away.

So now the beam gun is basically useless.

Coming in at number five are nets fired in the air from other drones.

And this makes sense

if you're trying to capture the bad drone for forensic investigation.

But net carrying drones by default are going to be slower and less maneuverable.

So they're beatable with speed and agility.

Now, all of this would be real bad news were it

not for the sixth method that even works.

If you designed a super drone

that combined all the tricks to defeat methods one through five,

and it's possibly the oldest method of destruction known to man.

Smashing stuff.

And because this method is so foolproof, Anduril makes a blazing fast drone

appropriately called Anvil, whose only job is to use kinetic energy

to bust up a dangerous drone into thousands of pieces.

Imagine a children's bowling ball thrown twice

as fast as a major league Baseball fastball.

That's what it's like getting hit by Anvil.

And so naturally, after hearing all of this, I wanted to see it in action.

So they took me out to their test grounds, where they set up a scenario

where a bad guy drone was zooming towards our position.