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Epirus High-Power Microwave Defeats Drones
Epirus, a Los Angeles company, has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research; it's a part of the High-power Microwave Autonomous Vehicle Operational Capability (HAVOC) program.
(Epirus vehicle-mounted high-power microwave system )
Epirus's Leonidas platform — the technology underneath HAVOC — defeats fiber-optic drones through a mechanism that bypasses the control-link problem entirely. Rather than attacking the communications path, Leonidas attacks the drone's onboard electronics directly.The system uses Gallium Nitride semiconductors arranged in a software-defined phased array antenna to generate and direct microwave energy in high-power bursts. When that energy strikes a drone's flight controller, electronic speed controller, video processor, or power management system, it induces electrical currents in the circuitry that cause component failure or force a reset — bringing the drone down without a kinetic impact, a targeting solution on a specific aircraft, or any dependency on what communication technology the drone uses.
(Via Techtimes.)
Without the technical terminology, science fiction Golden Age great Ray Cummings describes the same idea; he called it the robot deranger in his 1931 story The Exile of Time:
"The Micrad is coming with the long-range deranger," Tina told them briefly. After a moment they hastened away upstairs and I heard one of them shouting...We saw a white search-beam from the Micrad come down and disclosed a group of Robots on the laboratory roof. Then the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and they stood an instant transfixed, stricken, with wildly flailing arms. Then one toppled and fell. Then another.
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