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Dutch Police Train Bald Eagles To Take Out Drones
Qbertino writes: Heise.de (German article) reports that the Dutch police is training raptor birds — bald eagles, too — to take down drones. There's a video (narrated and interviewed in Dutch) linked in TFA. It's a test phase and not yet determined if this is going real — concerns about the birds getting injured are among the counter-arguments against this course of action. This all is conducted by a company called "Guard from above," which designs systems to prevent smugling via drones. The article also mentions MTU's net-shooting quadcopter concept of a drone-predator. Of course, there are also 'untrained' birds taking out quadcopters, as you might have seen already.
Another in a long list of moronic solutions that will never work against an intelligent attack, or even a large number of idiots.
Firstly, this is research; so, they are saying "could this work?" Research is what you do when you don't know, but want to find out. Secondly, they are not talking about large, sustained attacks - hopefully there will better ways of handling this, but there is a need to protect certain areas, like airports, from the occasional, stray drone.
One reason it seems attractive to use a trained animal is that animals are already fully autonomous. If you can train large birds of prey to attack drones, you can pretty much leave it to patrol the area. Birds are territorial, so they will tend to stay within an area, if there is enough food available, and it is already well known that these birds can be trained to always come back to their handlers for food. All in all, it might not be a stupid idea to try to get it to work.
What really made me decide to comment on this was the never-ending contraryness that always meets news about things people don't understand or don't feel fits in to their own, narrow field of interest. Looking back, it seems to me like most of the best things innovations started as something that people didn't understand and couldn't see the point in. If it had been obvious to most, it wouldn't have been much of an innovation, really.