The SkyWall 100 is one of the latest device promising to protect the world from the impending drone takeover. It’s essentially a smart bazooka that fires a canister filled with a net at drones 100 meters away. Boom headshot.
An operator targets the drone and fires a canister that contains a large net that gets tangled in the drone’s rotors. A parachute then delivers the drone back to earth in a civilized manner. OpenWorks Engineering is the company behind the device and is marketing the device to protect sensitive events and buildings. This isn’t something meant to protect your home from snooping neighbors.
The shoulder-mounted device uses an intelligent system that locks onto a drone, assisting the operator in firing and targeting. The scope identifies and then calculates a firing pattern based on the drone’s distance and vector. The technology sounds a lot like the systems in TrackingPoint’s smart guns that lets anyone get a bullseye on a target hundreds of meters away.
The company is also announcing the SkyWall 200, a semi-permanent launcher mounted on a tripod and offers increased range over the SkyWall 100. The SkyWall 300 is a turret-like device designed to be permanently installed. The company says tracking and detection is built into the 300 and operators can control the device remotely.
As drone technology advances, anti-drone technology has followed suited. SkyWall’s solution combine’s brute force with a bleeding edge tracking system. Other devices use radio waves to disrupt the targeted drone’s communications while other systems still use larger drones to capture smaller drones.
SkyWall has not released the price for their systems yet but says it will be available by the end of the year.
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Matt Burns is a longtime technology journalist, now Editorial Director at Insight Media Group and formerly Managing Editor at TechCrunch. At Insight Media Group, he guides coverage and contributor programs across fast-growing tech publications. Before that, he spent 15+ years at TechCrunch, rising from contributor to Managing Editor, helping scale the newsroom and program Disrupt’s stages and TechCrunch’s other events. Earlier, he also wrote for Engadget. Matt co-founded the Resilience Conference, an event series at the intersection of defense, security, and startup innovation. There he builds agendas, hosts sessions, and launched “Launch @ Resilience,” a showcase for early-stage teams building nation-defending technology. Across roles, he’s reported on and moderated conversations in AI, mobility, frontier tech, and the hard problems technology companies face. He’s interviewed world leaders, top investors, startup founders, and public-company CEOs. Lifelong Michiganian with plenty of Silicon Valley miles, he brings Midwest empathy and an editor’s eye. Offstage, he works with teams to sharpen narrative and validate go-to-market plans, and, when possible, camping along Lake Michigan.