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.

Comments

Smugling?

[Nidi62]

So the Dutch are using birds to stop people from flying drones arrogantly?

Re:Smugling?

[thegarbz]

No. They are only using them on criminals and terrorists.

How they determine that before they set off on a mission is anyone's guess.

Re:Smugling?

[rmdingler]

Once upon a time there used to be a toy called 'lawn jarts'.

And children rode bicycles without pads or helmets, when they weren't riding en masse to something in the back of pickup trucks.

Child abuse was rampant... 10, 11, and 12 year old children were routinely left alone after school at home.

bald eagles, too

[thaylin]

You do realize, if I am not mistaken, that bald eagles are raptors, so "too" is a bit redundant. Maybe "including"?

Re: bald eagles, too

[OzPeter]

Slashdot has a style manual

Slashdot has a style manual? Next you'll be telling me that TIMMAY!! is an actual journalist.

Re: bald eagles, too

[newcastlejon]

The way I read it was along the lines of "not just any raptors, but bald eagles!". Americans do have a fascination with that particular species, more so than other eagles or raptors in general.

It's never too early to train your allies...

[ffkom]

... for the upcoming war against the flying SkyNet minions ;-)

Now we know what the vulture was for!

[urdak]

In previous news in slashdot, an alleged Israeli spy vulture was caught by Lebanon.
The Israelis claimed this was ridiculous, that it was just an innocent bird.
But now we know the truth: the vulture was really out to get Lebanese drones!

Re:Release a net

[mwvdlee]

If they're doing that, they might as well teach the birds to fly upside down underneath the drones, unscrew the access panel and rewire the electronics to operate on a radio frequency used by the cops so they gain control over it.

You've got to hand it to the Dutch

[Lucas123]

They so often seem to handle society's little problems so much more elegantly than the rest of us.

Re:You've got to hand it to the Dutch

[thegarbz]

Tell me about it. They've out American'd the Americans. What's the solution in the freedom country? Shoot the things out the sky with a healthy dose of the second amendment. The Dutch's answer? Take it out with the animal personification of freedom itself.

Re:Release a net

[Citizen of Earth]

Instead of training birds and risking bad PR from injuring them, why not just get cheap anti-drone drones to drop nets on drones?

Oh, sure, they'll take out drones...

[QilessQi]

...but they STILL won't fly Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom. Damn you, Eagles!

"Myth" Confirmed

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been severely cut by my own carelessness with my DJI Phantom; I'll have to say myth confirmed.

Those "small" plastic propellers cut the fuck out of me! I would not allow a bird or other animal (some dogs love chasing drones) to come in contact with a drone.

Larger carbon fiber blades will be much worse.

They will run out of birds before drones.

[dsmatthews9379]

Another in a long list of moronic solutions that will never work against an intelligent attack, or even a large number of idiots.

What does such a bird cost? How many can you deploy at once and how many drones can it remove per unit of time? Can you train it to ignore a $20, deliberately attractive, decoy drone (or ten) an target the payload drone instead?

The only generally useful and economically viable anti-drone system is one that can take out hundreds per minute and at a significant range without causing collateral damage by spraying the surroundings with debris or projectiles, and without causing broadcasted broadband electromagnetic interference.

Re:They will run out of birds before drones.

[jandersen]

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.

Eagle Injury. No!

[OFnow]

Nobody wants injured Eagles. So arm them with submachine guns. What could go wrong?

Not an issue

[Gorath99]

It's not actually meant for anything like that at all.

In the video, the cops explain (in Dutch, so I completely understand that this isn't obvious to parent) that it's meant to take out the odd drone that is - often inadvertently - flying somewhere where it really shouldn't, such as near an airport, or somewhere where an air ambulance needs to land. Nowhere in the video is it claimed that the system will be used to stop terrorists, smuggling, mass idiocy, or anything like that. Consider it the air equivalent of a police canine unit.

Re:Release a net

[RackinFrackin]

Then we'll have to build the anti-anti-anti-drone drone!

Stupid police.

[hack slash]

The quadcopter they showed with the eagle is a Spyrit Max FPV T2M, a toy level 230 size (measured in mm diagonally from motor-motor), and weighs less than 600g when it has the prop guards & camera on board (which it didn't at the time), yet the 360 sized quads (like the DJI Phantom) weigh around a 1000g and get heavier when you add things a camera & 3 axis gimbal, plus they have brushless motors that are far more powerful than the brushed motors of the Spyrit.

A Cheerson CX-20 is around the same size as a Phantom, and one has already accidentally killed a bald eagle that had attacked it: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=33893158&postcount=56152