Specialists from Military University of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation have invented a new way to deal with a swarm of small drones. According to the document published on the Rospatent (Federal Service for Intellectual Property), it is based on using a quadcopter, releasing frags over the territory of the protected area.
According to the information contained in the abstract of the invention, this is a miniature aircraft equipped with a control unit, a multi-barrel combat module, and four telescopic guides that face horizontally to the sides and are interconnected by a network. The latter "sprays" the ammunition into small frags flying in different directions.
The reasonability of such technology is explained by the growing threat of invention using drone swarm attacks on important military and civilian infrastructure facilities.
The “intelligence” of the swarm supposes the coordinated activities of a ‘drone-agents” group, locally interacting with each other and the environment. Despite the simplicity of such a technology, together these drones demonstrate "exceptionally complex" behavior, acting as a single large organism.
Due to its low visibility, the swarm can have a great influence on warfare, conducting reconnaissance and launching airstrikes against combat vehicles, control points, congestions of vehicles and people, even in conditions of counteraction of air defense systems and electronic warfare.
According to experts of the Military University, the existing means of countering drone swarms, including air defence, electronic warfare, fighters, and small arms are not able to effectively cope with this task, another shortcoming is the high cost of their operation.
The system described above is supposed to solve the issue. The security drones hover over an object and set a network, relying on sensors. These sensors detect the movement of an attacking swarm and send the signal to the electric blasting caps of the multi-barrel combat module munitions. After that all the barrels fire a simultaneous volley, destroying the adversary’s drones with a field of frags.
Source: Ria
