SkySafe bombards unauthorized drones with radio waves to wirelessly bring them down

By Chloe Olewitz April 26, 2016

As drone technology quickly gains popularity, the tools designed to keep order in the remote-controlled skies are racing to keep up. One of the latest such contraptions, dubbed SkySafe, uses a targeted burst of radio signals to bring unauthorized drones to the ground before any damage can be done. The company claims to have created the first effective tool so far that will help keep unwanted drones out of dangerous situations. With a team of MIT engineers and military minds powering its product, SkySafe takes drone safety very seriously.

SkySafe is a complete drone detection system, not just the knock-out technology that grounds unwanted UAVs. Through a network of nodes covering a designated “SkySafe” area, the system can detect and locate drones, and track them if they are only approaching private airspace without actually crossing the line. If an unauthorized or unidentified drone does fly into the danger zone, the SkySafe tech grounds the drone immediately. While SkySafe does admit that they use radio frequency emissions to ground the drones, the company is keeping many of the system specifics under wraps.

Since SkySafe did just receive a fairly public investment from Andreessen Horowitz, the secrecy isn’t much of a surprise. “We support the entire drone community. We want everyone who’s operating drones in a safe manner to be able to utilize them to their fullest potential and we’re going to do everything we can to make that future a reality,” reads a recent SkySafe blog post. And since the near future may see fleets of properly authorized drones flying in sensitive airspace, SkySafe says that in addition to grounding unwanted craft, the system will be able to identify and recognize drones that have been cleared for flight.

The company hasn’t landed any big contracts quite yet, but it’s probabbly safe to assume that SkySafe will be working with large companies and organizations looking to protect their privately-owned airspace – think Hollywood movie sets, Silicon Valley campuses, and safety-concerned airports. Until the airspace is clear of pesky toys that endanger larger aircraft, it seems that the race to build anti-drone technology will continue.

Topics

Chloe is a writer from New York with a passion for technology, travel, and playing devil's advocate. You can find out more…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.