What is this world coming to when you can’t even enjoy sitting in your living room without some jamoke flying a drone in through the window? Is nothing sacred? Won’t someone think of the children?
Apparently [Drew Pilcher] did, and the result is this anti-drone sentry gun. It’s a sturdily built machine – one might even say it’s overbuilt. The gimbal is made from machined steel pieces, and the swivels are a pair of Sherline stepper-controlled rotary tables with 1/40 of a degree accuracy selling for $400 each. Riding atop that is a Nerf rifle, which is cocked by a stepper-actuated linear slide, as well as a Kinect for object tracking. The tracking app is a little rough – just OpenCV hacked onto the Kinect SDK – but good enough for testing. The gun tracks as smoothly as one would expect given the expensive hardware, and the auto-cocking feature works well if a bit slowly. Based as it is on Nerf technology, this sentry is only indicated for the control of the micro-drones seen in the snuff video below, but really, anyone afflicted by indoor infestations of Phantoms or Mavics has bigger problems to worry about.
Over-engineered? Perhaps, but it’s better than letting the menace of indoor drones go unanswered. And it’s far from the first sentry gun we’ve seen, targeting everything from cats to squirrels using lasers, paintballs, and even plain water.
Coolest thing I have seen all month. Maybe all year.
He really needs to upgrade the gun to a Nerf Prometheus!
I’d replace nerf with a bog standard glock and use it to solve pigeons problem on my balcony.
And then having a Roomba to clean the mess!
A pellet gun would be sufficient for pigeons.
AWESOME.
Finally someone doesn’t mess around and actually builds a serious, precise setup for this. I’ve never seen such a well built system for these as this one. Well done!
I can attest to the accuracy of those rotary tables- I use a modified manual one the same make for micromachining as my 4th axis. Biggest news to me here is that after a decade they finally came down by almost 1/2 in price for the cnc version. 400$ is cheap for a well made, precise and accurate cnc rotary table.
Only thing I’m not sure of, the rotary tables use a 40:1 worm gear and worm to move, probably not as fast to move as you might need for short distances indoors, even though it does hit…this would, however, be extremely accurate outdoors at longer ranges, like, pinpoint precise…
Mount a paintball gun to this, or a telescope- you have something serious either way. Excellent work man!
setup reminds me of the systems I worked on in my first job. r400 and r600 RWS systems.
video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1V8S7LSWAU
Honestly my first thought was swap the lead screw for a pneumatic system, but then I thought why not just replace the nerf gun itself. would need a custom feeder but shouldn’t be tooo difficult
That really is an awesome, high quality build.
Awesome! Where is this based and how much beer and pizza does it cost to fly the drone?
Good setup , now uses two galvanometer to make this machine kill mosquitoes with laser , asuming that the kinect can see them :-)
He could make a fortune selling this to British airports!
he could put it on top of a bigger drone, and needs an uzi
When microdrones become a problem I will most certainly keep this project in mind. Do need one that can take out slightly smaller bloodsucking drones we call skeeters around here. By take out I mean ‘red mist’ so nerf is insufficient projectile. Flame thrower and oversized Tesla coil is out. Neighbors not comfortable with those. Was thinking small rail but logistically and cost prohibitive.
this is fantastic.
and desperately needed in the near future.
“Slaughterbot” Autonomous Killer Drones | Technology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk
0:45 … Stochastic motion prevents being taken out by snipers ;)
I see he finally solved his tracking issues.
in other news sentry gun thwarted by done with c4
You kinda missed the rock paper scissors joke here
For those wanting to murder mosquitoes consider ultrasonic transducers sending a frequency spectrum that resonates with their range of body sizes, create a net of such transducers and I expect anything finding major parts of it’s body resonating as it approaches will keep it’s distance.
Eh, I take it back, IR lasers and tracking is an awesome solution.
I need one of these, but with a pellet gun and AI that can tell the difference between a rat/mouse and a cat, dog, chicken, or human :-P
A lot of my friends have suggested this would work great for guarding gardens. I probably wouldn’t go more powerful than an airsoft gun though just in case it makes a mistake.