A drone with a sniper rifle sounds like a fearsome weapon, but developing the technology to hit with precision is harder than it looks. Andrei Bogdanov, CEO of Barcelona-based drone company UAVHE, believes he has the answer. But he is not developing his Baduga flying rifle for the military, and perfecting the technology is not his biggest issue.
“Live shooting, especially from the air, is more of a legal difficulty than a technical one,” says Bogdanov.
The problem Bogdanov is trying to solve is the control of feral pigs. The Twitterverse mocked an American user who suggested that he needed an assault weapon to prevent his yard being invaded by “30-50 feral hogs” in 2019. But controlling these animals, which cause an estimated $1.5 billion in damage in the U.S. alone each year, is a major challenge.
Hunters usually only kill a few in a pack, causing the rest to scatter. In Spain where Bogdanov is based, hunters shoot some 400,000 wild pigs every year, but this is not enough to stop the population rising. Hunting by helicopter is more effective, but prohibitively expensive. Texas company Helibacon arranges two-hour hog-hunting flights from $3k per person, with extra charges if you want to use a machinegun (they even have miniguns). It might be a fun day out for well-heeled hunters, but it would take a lot of helicopter tourists to dent the Texan hog population, estimated at 3 million and rising.
Bogdanov, has developed Baduga, a hunting rifle mounted on a small drone. A smart suspension system keeps the weapon’s center of gravity below the point of attachment, and gyro-stabilization ensures that the barrel remains stable regardless of wind or motion. The sights, including a multispectral camera able to see in the dark, are mounted on the barrel.
Bogdanov says that the firing platform is effectively decoupled and independent from the drone, firing as easily as it would from a tripod. The system automatically compensates for recoil, and has a magazine of 60 rounds. A further development may see automated in-flight magazine changing.
Early versions of the design employed off-the-shelf gyros, the latest iteration is custom-built for this application and weighs around 4 kilos, with the rifle adding a similar weight. The platform is a standard heavy commercial drone, similar to those which carry movie cameras and survey instruments.
Shooting aficionados describe accuracy is in terms of ‘minutes of arc,’ one minute equaling an inch at 100 yards, or about 6 centimeters at 200 meters. Bogdanov says his setup achieves an accuracy of better than 0.1 minutes of arc, so the limitation is the accuracy of the rifle and ammunition. He says that system overall of rifle, stabilizing mounting and drone has minute-of-arc accuracy, enabling the operator to reliably and humanely kill a pig from 200 meters with the first shot. In fact, the drone enjoys some advantages in terms of accuracy.
“Unlike ground shooters, a drone in the air has a more accurate picture of the direction and strength of the wind over the altitude spectrum — it is easily calculated from the drift of the aircraft relative to the ground,” says Bogdanov.
To ensure the development process complies with legal requirements, Bogdanov has built ground and air test systems and has tested firing on the ground. But test firing from the air would move into uncharted legal waters. Bogdanov says he wants to open discussions with other developers to prepare the public first.
“We have to design in such a way that we prepare the public and regulators, explaining the restrictions, and layer cake of security levels that we put into these decisions,“ says Bogdanov. The problem is, as he puts it, that currently such projects “scare the **** out of society.”
The public attitude is not surprising among people who have been raised on Terminator movies and other visions of robot apocalypse. Rogue killer robots are now a movie cliché, but that does not mean they are a real-life risk.
“I would like to slightly open the Overton window on this topic and start discussing these solutions, which are now under technological taboo,” says Bogdanov.
So why not go down the obvious route and develop this specifically as a weapon system for the defense sector?
“Despite a common myth, developments for the military do not bring in a lot of money,” says Bogdanov. “We have shown it many times, but so far the matter has not gone further than talks and interest from military customers connected with it.”
He is also concerned with the possible effect that this technology would have if developed as a weapon. Drones are already seen as dangerous, and, although there has not been any real use outside of conflicts like Ukraine, he does not want the public to be any more fearful.
“The militarization of drones could lead to a total ban on flights in the short term,” says Bogdanov. “Any drone in the sky begins to be perceived as a potential danger, even far beyond the combat zone.”
Hence, Bogdanov would like the technology to be used for peaceful, constructive purposes.
Baduga’s rifle is mounted on a gyro-stabilized arm which keeps it completely steady
Meanwhile, military sniper drones are certainly in the pipeline, if not already in the air. In May 2023 Russian gun makers LobaevArms announced that they were working on a drone-mounted sniper rifle for the military.
Other companies have showed off sniper drones with stabilization systems. Turkish company Asisgard has reportedly sold its Songar armed drone to the Turkish military. Several Chinese companies have released videos of flying snipers, but these appear to be at the prototype stage. DGA, a French military research center, hopes to begin live fire testing with a rifle-armed drone called AVATAR by the end of the year and Israeli company Smash Dragon are also making progress.
The irony is that while drones for constructive purposes such as delivering medical supplies, carrying passengers and surveying power lines get held up for years due to safety discussions, military drones appear to exist in a different world. The regulatory process needs to ensure that an ethical stance like Bogdanov’s is not penalized while others race ahead.