Sponsored by Siemens.
The cheap drone problem stopped being hypothetical a while ago. For a couple thousand dollars and some open-source software, anyone can assemble an airframe that flies autonomously, resists jamming and carries a payload. Footage out of Ukraine has made the capability common knowledge, and the leap from battlefield to civilian airspace is already happening.
That leap is what three German master’s students had in mind when they founded Daedalus Defence.
“In Europe, on all the Christmas markets, we have big bumpers already because there were threats of terrorist attacks from people driving into the crowds,” said Ferdinand Lorenz, who handles product development and business strategy for the company. “We thought of a similar thing, but in the air. Protecting places where people are crowded and potentially vulnerable.”
Lorenz, Marius Kienzle and Felix Pfeifer are finishing their master’s degrees, all with bachelor’s degrees in engineering behind them. Pfeifer and Kienzle have known each other since kindergarten, while Lorenz joined the group a few years back. The company itself started the way a lot of startups do: a conversation that got away from everybody.
“We sat down, talked about concepts, and as we are all engineers we kind of started developing ideas right away,” Lorenz said. “And we’re like, ‘No, no, this is the best idea. This is the best idea.'”
A small university business challenge gave the idea somewhere to go, and development work began in October of 2025.
The Catch, Not the Kill
Plenty of counter-drone concepts end with a target dropping out of the sky. Daedalus Defence is built around the premise that dropping the target is the easy part. When this takes place over a crowded space like an arena or major metro area, just dropping a hostile target out of the sky can have massive collateral damage.
The Daedalus interceptor carries a patented folding net structure that deploys mid-flight and wraps the target. The interceptor carries the captured drone out of the protected area to be dealt with outside of populated areas. Nothing falls on anybody.
“Even if it doesn’t [carry a payload], if you’re flying over people or critical infrastructure, debris falling from a hundred meters can still damage or hurt people,” Lorenz said.
The net drops away after the fact, and the interceptor flies again. That reusability is deliberate. “We don’t want these to be one-use drones,” Lorenz said. “That way, we save the users a bit of money.”
The first product targets a specific regulatory band: a system under 4kg, capable of catching drones up to about 2.5kg. Bigger interceptors for bigger targets are on the roadmap, but the team is concentrating on refining the development of this first system. According to Lorenz, a single unit is enough to cover a small site, like an electrical substation, while a major airport might need twenty.
The company’s system also logs forensic data during pursuit, on the theory that a captured drone and a flight record are worth more to an operator than a pile of wreckage.
Where the AI Goes and Where It Doesn’t
Daedalus Defence is selectively an AI company in the way a lot of hardware startups are now.
“Our plan is to make the object detection and recognition with AI, but flight planning should be algorithmic,” said Felix Pfeifer, who handles the software side. “So it’s deterministic, and it’s the same every time.”
He’s blunt about why. The simulation-to-reality gap in AI flight control is real, and betting a 4kg aircraft flying over a crowd on a learned policy isn’t a bet the team wants to make yet. Reinforcement learning for flight control is on the bench as an experiment, but it’s not a product.
Detection has its own failure modes, which is why the camera feed is cross-checked against LiDAR and ultrasonic sensors, and why a human currently issues the go/no-go before a capture. Under current European regulations, a fully autonomous system isn’t legal anyway and Lorenz doesn’t seem to mind. “For now, I’m quite happy that there are regulations and there’s a person watching and deciding,” he said. “The trust in the end is more on the human side.”
Marius Kienzle focuses on piloting their current system, and explained that the challenge of autonomy and using AI varies depending on where the drone is flying. Restricted airspace does some of the classification work for you. In a zone where no drone is permitted, the identification problem gets considerably simpler.
The hardware is currently an off-the-shelf construction, with bought motors, flight controllers and camera modules assembled for a job no stock airframe does. “We need something with way more power than commercial drones offer,” Lorenz said. A typical DJI-class motor won’t carry and stabilize an aircraft capturing and carrying a second aircraft. The flight stack is open source. The team tested three designs and moved to the hardest one to configure, because the easy ones don’t let you tune anything.
Leveraging Solid Edge CAD
The design workflow is refreshingly unglamorous, and it’s the part most early-stage hardware teams would recognize. It starts on paper with working principles sketched out. From there it moves into Designcenter Solid Edge, where Kienzle models the assembly, pulls in the open-source frame and motor geometry and produces renderings the team can put in front of people before anything exists. Then it goes to the 3D printer.
“We immediately started 3D printing, because we like hardware and seeing our progress,” Lorenz said. “And from then on, it was iteration by iteration. Solid Edge, 3D printing, Solid Edge, 3D printing. And in between, always flying.”
The net mechanism is somewhere around its seventh iteration. Different airframes, different net sizes and different mounting adapters have all cycled through the same loop.
Kienzle exports the STL geometry with material data into an open-source simulation platform he built himself as part of his thesis, creating a virtual environment for testing flight behavior before anything gets committed to the air.
For now, the CAD is strictly CAD. “We only use Solid Edge as our CAD software, because that’s the only thing that we can use with our university license,” Kienzle said. Siemens through its startup support network has since extended the team a Designcenter Solid Edge Premium license, which lifts the student-version limitations they’d been working around.
Kienzle explained, “We are not that deep in production or in special aerospace simulation. So we don’t have the linkage of a PDM system the whole way through.” Right now, the job is hinges, brackets and printed adapters, and according to Kienzle, Designcenter Solid Edge tools clear that bar with room to spare.
Production planning follows the same logic. The net is single-use and can be made from inexpensive materials. The impact-bearing structural parts will almost certainly get tooled and injection molded eventually, but which parts stay 3D printed depends on stiffness regulations for flight over people that don’t exist yet.
“We have to look at every part and decide at the right stage,” Lorenz said.
The next year is about pilot deployments at real sites, in real conditions, and gathering more data. The team is actively looking for partners willing to host one of their drones, and like most startups, they will also be looking for investors. “Money means speed,” Lorenz said. “And in this environment, speed means money.”
“Our next major step is to focus on stabilization and high-speed flight simulations. This will allow us to verify and further improve our setup, particularly regarding air drag,” Kienzle added. “At the moment, we are not focusing on producing new or improved renderings or animations. Our priority is to reach a point where we can reliably demonstrate our prototype in real flight.”
Learn more about Siemens Designcenter Solid Edge for Startups.
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