Light Blade laser slashes threats from the sky
A laser developed to cut thick plastic for greenhouses has been modified to destroy airborne drones and other less sophisticated aerial threats.
An engineer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and colleagues from industry have formed OptiDefense to optimise and commercialise the system, which has been dubbed Light Blade.
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Current drones need to maintain a communication link to their handler or to GPS, and electronic jamming systems can exploit that weakness to enact a ‘soft kill’ on the threat. Future autonomous drones will navigate via onboard sensors and cameras, eschewing any sort of exploitable communication link. In order to neutralise them before they reach their target, a ‘hard kill’ option is needed to physically target and shoot down the drone.
With support from Israel's Border Police Commander Yaakov (Kobi) Shabtai, Prof. Amiel Ishaaya of BGU's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and two colleagues developed the Light Blade system that can be used in urban environments.
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