In December 2018 thousands of holiday travelers were stranded at London’s Gatwick Airport because of reports of drones flying nearby. The airport—one of Europe’s busiest—was shut down for two days, which caused major delays and cost airlines millions of dollars. Unauthorized drones in commercial airspace have caused similar incidents in the U.S. and around the world. To stop them, researchers are now developing a detection system inspired by a different type of airborne object: a living fly. This work could have applications far beyond drone detection, researchers write in a new paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
“It’s quite awesome,” says Frank Ruffier, a researcher at the Etienne-Jules Marey Institute of Movement Sciences at Aix-Marseille University in France and the French National Center for Scientific Research, who was not involved with the new study. “This basic research on the fly is solving a real problem in computer science.”
That solution has implications for, among other things, overcoming the inherent difficulty of detecting drones. As these remotely piloted flying machines become ever cheaper and more accessible, many experts worry they will become increasingly disruptive. Their prevalence raises a variety of issues, says Brian Bothwell, co-director of the Science, Technology Assessment and Analytics team at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. “Drones can be operated by both the careless and the criminal,” he notes. Careless drone pilots can inadvertently cause accidents; criminal ones can use these devices to smuggle drugs across national borders or drop contraband into prison yards, for example. “It’s important to detect them,” Bothwell says.
Recent Comments