A few years ago, a video surfaced on social media in which a camera drone at a music festival instantly crashed to the ground when hit with confetti streamers shot out of a cannon. This (unintentional) grounding technique was so effective that the U.S. military appears to have decided to pursue it.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently shared a video demonstrating its confetti-fueled anti-drone system. When an unauthorized drone is detected in flight, the system launches a small autonomous flying device armed with a streamer-like material that looks a lot like confetti when deployed in the video. The device fires the streamers at the drone, and all that needs to happen is for one of them to get wrapped around the propeller blade and that drone will be down for the count.
