Worried that a consumer drone might be trying to spy on you? Well, the leading vendor DJI is developing a system to let anyone with a smartphone detect whether the company's drones are flying nearby.
On Wednesday, DJI demonstrated the "drone-to-phone" monitoring system, which involves the aerial bot broadcasting Wi-Fi based signals that existing smartphones can easily detect.
"Using a simple app, anyone within radio range of the drone can receive that signal and learn the location, altitude, speed and direction of the drone, as well as an identification number for the drone and the location of the pilot," the company said in the announcement.
DJI developed the system as the US Federal Aviation Administration is drafting a rule that'll require all consumer drones to offer "remote identification," or what's basically an electronic license plate. With the ID system, aviation authorities and police officers will be able to track nearby drones in flight and also figure out who owns them in the event the aerial bots cause trouble.
"Around the world, aviation authorities have said remote ID is the key to allowing more complex drone use, and to solving concerns about safety and security," said DJI vice president Brendan Schulman in a statement. "DJI's direct drone-to-phone remote ID shows we're committed to providing a solution in a way that is instantly usable worldwide without any additional infrastructure."
The key advantage with DJI's solution is that it doesn't require the customer to buy any new equipment or obtain a cellular plan for their drone. Instead, it relies on the existing Wi-Fi Aware protocol to send out a radio signal to nearby phones.
"Because it does not need to connect to a Wi-Fi base station, a cellular network or any other external system, it works in rural areas with no telecom service. In DJI's preliminary testing, the Wi-Fi Aware signals can be received from more than one kilometer away," the company said in today's announcement.
The demo of the phone-to-drone system occurred at a park in Montreal, Canada during an international drone conference, according to the company. A DJI Mavic Air and Mavic 2 Enterprise drone were able to transmit the Wi-Fi signals to smartphones from Samsung, Google and Xiaomi.
DJI plans on rolling out the system to customers as a future software update. But for now, it's still under wraps, pending guidance from aviation regulators. The Chinese company built the system off the existing DJI AeroScope technology, which it's been selling as a hardware unit so that operators at airports, prisons and nuclear power plants can identify nearby drones.