This Rifle Doesn’t Need Bullets To Shoot Down Drones

Hunting quadrotors with #8 buckshot might be a valid pasttime for some people, but the US Army is looking for a little more refinement.



The device you can see being used to kill an unsuspecting quadrotor is a ‘cyber rifle’, built by the Army Cyber Institute and demoed at the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting and Exposition.

The name is a little misleading: it’s not really a rifle: it’s a Raspberry Pi and a Wi-Fi antenna cobbled together, which takes advantage of a known security flaw with Parrot quadrotors to ‘shoot’ them down. The rifle shape, according to an interview with Popular Mechanics, is “mostly for kicks”.

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The familiar shape is meant to make it easier for military brass to understand the tactical application of cyber-weapons: it’s not some overly complicated computer; it’s just “Aim. Shoot. Crash.” The utility isn’t limited to drones, either: the ACI also showed it turning off lights and opening the doors of a cute little bunker.

[Popular Mechanics]