In 2015, Israeli Special Forces likely made history by using a sniper rifle mounted on a commercial drone to take out a target. The robotic solution that achieved such pinpoint accuracy came from Duke Robotics, a startup founded by veterans of the Israel Defense Forces. That startup has since developed a multi-rotor sniper drone capable of accurately firing a wide array of weapons such as military assault rifles and grenade launchers.
This is not like the usual military drones flying above modern battlefields. Predator and Reaper drones operated by the U.S. military and its allies resemble large unmanned aircraft that provide air support by firing Hellfire missiles or other weapons with a fairly large damage or blast radius—a factor that can raise the risk of accidentally wounding or killing nearby civilians. Smaller military drones such as hand-thrown Ravens tend to be unarmed robotic scouts. By comparison, Duke Robotics' sniper drone, called TIKAD, is designed to precisely target individual enemies in crowded city environments. It's also meant to handle dangerous situations that might ordinarily require human soldiers to clear a sniper or nest of insurgents from a building.
"The idea is to create something that enables you to send in a sniper rifle on a drone and eliminate a target with pinpoint accuracy," says Raziel “Razi” Atuar, co-founder and CEO of Duke Robotics. "And then you save lives on both sides."
