Hijacking Quadcopters With A MAVLink Exploit

Not many people would like a quadcopter with an HD camera hovering above their property, and until now there’s no technical resource to tell drone pilots to buzz off. That would require actually talking to a person. Horrors. Why be reasonable when you can use a Raspberry Pi to hijack a drone? It’s the only reasonable thing to do, really.

The folks at shellIntel have been messing around with quads for a while, and have recently stumbled upon a vulnerability in the Pixhawk flight controller and every other quadcopter that uses the MAVLink protocol. This includes the Parrot AR.drone, ArduPilot, PX4FMU, pxIMU, SmartAP, MatrixPilot, Armazila 10dM3UOP88, Hexo+, TauLabs and AutoQuad. Right now, the only requirement to make a drone fall out of the sky is a simple radio module and a computer. A Raspberry Pi was used in shellIntel’s demo.

The exploit is a consequence of the MAVLink sending the channel or NetID used to send commands from the transmitter to the quadcopter in each radio frame. This NetID number is used so multiple transmitters don’t interfere with each other; if two transmitters use the same NetID, there will be a conflict and two very confused pilots. Unfortunately, this also means anyone with a MAVLink radio using the same NetID can disarm a quadcopter remotely, and anyone with a MAVLink radio can tell a quad to turn off, or even emulate the DJI Phantom’s ‘Return to China’ function.

The only required hardware for this exploit is a $100 radio and three lines of code. It is certainly possible to build a Raspberry Pi-based box that would shut down any Pixhawk-equipped quadcopter within radio range, although the folks at shellIntel didn’t go that far just yet. Now it’s just a proof of concept to demonstrate that there’s always a technical solution to your privacy concerns. Video below.

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Draw bot poetry

Sandy Poems Drawn By A Robot Named Skryf

If you were lucky at the 2015 World Maker Faire you may have stumbled upon strange writings of poetry on the ground — written in sand.  While at first confusing, if you followed the poetry along you also caught a glimpse of Skryf, a draw bot by [Gijs van Bon].

skryf-drawbot-thumbThe creator was asked to perform poems for a festival about transition and letting go. Naturally, building a robot to write poetry in sand was the downright obvious answer to the question.

I was asked to perform 40 poems during a 10 day festival, and the poems were about transition and letting go. And then I thought the obvious thing to do as an artist is to make a machine that writes those poems with sand. I started writing them, and when the third poem was written, the first one was completely gone, and it was such a beautiful thing.

The robot uses a laptop for input, which is connected to the bicycle carriage. One servo controls the left-to-right movement, and another releases the sand. Forward and back is controlled by the main drive train, which must have been fun to account for (they aren’t servos!)

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