When drones go bad, what can you do? Shooting them down could be dangerous, especially if they have explosives on board. So why not pit drone against drone? That’s the reasoning behind this drone catcher, created by a team at Michigan Tech University.

Using drones against each other isn’t a new idea, and there’s a whole cottage industry devoted to tech that stops drones. But Michigan Tech roboticist Mo Rastgaar and his students took on this new design as a “pet project.” Rastgaar got the idea to make a drone catcher two years ago, when he learned that snipers were protecting the crowd from renegade drones during the World Cup. There had to be a better solution. So Rastgaar and his students gave the drone catcher a net gun, which allows it to capture another drone in mid-air and carry it away.

The group took only two months to develop the project, Rastgaar told Ars via e-mail. “We started this project in fall 2014, and by January 2015 we had the system,” he said. “The video goes back to early 2015. So with some limited extra time we had, we developed this system as a proof of concept. Everything in the system, such as net size, net range, and hunter drone specifications, can be modified to meet the specific demands based on the different scenarios.”