A concept for catching drones with a net carried by cooperative UAVs

Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in research and by the public. Though this technology has many advantages and will possibly change industries, it also brings new challenges. Since UAVs are not bound to use existing infrastructure, current laws and rules can not be applied to them. Even worse, they can easily overcome existing infrastructural barriers and be a potential harm to society. Therefore, the German federal government funded several projects, which focus on developing a Drone Protection System (DPS). In this paper we will show a concept for an UAV-System capable of catching possibly dangerous UAVs in mid air as part of one of these projects called MIDRAS. After describing the project briefly and showing the state of the art with different existing solutions to stop none cooperative drones, we present the concept of developing our system in detail. Here, we first describe the hard- and software platform before showing our solution for high accuracy outdoor relative positioning. Next, we derive a way to get the optimal point of intersecting the target and further describe our planned master-slave system for the formation flight. We conclude the work with first preliminary results on catching drones in nets and flying our UAVs in formation as well as a short outlook on the next steps.