Tokyo Police Aim To Catch Drones In A Net

A Japanese protester flew a quadcopter with a symbolic amount of soil from the contaminated Fukushima region onto the roof of the Prime Minister’s office in April. Although it was a gesture, it alerted the Tokyo police department to the potential need to be able to pull drones out of the air.

drone_in_netSimply shooting them down won’t do — think of the innocent bystanders on the ground subjected to a rain of quadcopter parts. The Tokyo police’s solution: catch them in a net, flown by another quadcopter, of course.

We can’t embed it here, but go click through to the video. It looks like the police are having a really good time. How long before we see drone-net sets under the Christmas tree, or quadcopter-tag leagues? We’re uncertain of how far the Battlebots in the Sky movement got.

We have no shortage of yahoos driving quadcopters in the States, of course. From interfering with fire-fighting aircraft to simply flying too close to commercial airplanes, people are doing things that they simply shouldn’t. We’ve been covering the US government’s response that finally culminated in the FAA making rules requiring medium-weight drones to be registered. Watch our front page for more on that next week. Fly safe, folks.

[via The Verge]

39 thoughts on “Tokyo Police Aim To Catch Drones In A Net

  1. Apparently, they can only catch very slow and cooperative quadcopters with exposed rotors. A fast-moving quadcopter with rotor guards and no pointy bits won’t get caught in the net quite so easily.

    The obvious thing to do, of course, is to build a LARGER multirotor craft with rotor guards and some hooks on the bottom to catch theirs, lifting it by their own net.

    Or just use a small, fast quadcopter with rotor guards to flip the net over their craft; they have neglected to shield their own rotors.

      1. Actually seeing the starlings roosted on the power lines…. sorta makes you wonder how hard it would be to build a nano quad with some sort of insulated docking mechanism that could recharge via induction. I’m sure people would love that :P

    1. Exactly, have they not seen the speed at which the some quads can fly at? I watched a video where the passenger of a car was flying a 280 size quad through FPV video goggles along with the car, they got to 55 mph and it had no trouble keeping up. Search for “FPV Drone Racing from Moving Car”

      I highly doubt that big drone with the net could catch up and stop a quad doing 55mph!

    1. They constructed a quad with a net under it, but they won’t stop there.
      They’ll construct bigger quads with bigger nets, and then they’ll construct a quad with a net under it so large, it will destroy them all…

  2. I don’t get why people do stupid thing with expensive drones. The ones out bouncing off skyscrapers, landing on the white house lawn and peeping on people cost anywhere from $800 to $2000. I personally refuse to do anything asinine with my money like this. I guess I just respect the rules, or maybe it’s that I understand the value of money. My phantom stays away from people, houses and I have kissed the sky a few times out in the country but far from any aircraft. You have to do it at least once. The view is amazing. But I did the right thing and joined the AMA, and now I only go to about 400ft.

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