This is quite cool since past efforts in this direction have usually relied on crutches like outside-in imaging and positioning.
A few details I picked up:
* The drones are a spec drone across the league. It's a fairly large-footprint FPV racing drone (it's a 5" propped drone, but it's very stretched out and quite heavy) with both a Betaflight flight controller and a Jetson Orin NX onboard. Teams were only allowed an IMU and a single forward camera.
* It's unclear to me whether the teams were allowed to bypass the typical Betaflight flight controller which is present on the drone and use direct IMU input and ESC commands from the Jetson, or whether they were sending and receiving commands from the flight controller and relying on its onboard rate stabilization PID loop.
DCL is kind of a weird drone racing league since it's made for TV; it's mostly simulator based with, more recently, only few real events a year. The spec DCL drone isn't very capable compared to the more open-specification drones in racing leagues like MultiGP, in large part to keep the events more spectator friendly. This probably makes it more amenable to AI, which is an interesting side effect.
> One of the core new elements of the drone’s AI is the use of a deep neural network that doesn’t send control commands to a traditional human controller, but directly to the motors.
I saw that too - I'm assuming it means they're indeed using the DNN for stabilization. This has been done several times over the years, but generally with results which only rival PID and don't surpass it, so that's quite interesting. What's odd is that the physical architecture of the drone doesn't really make sense for this, so there must be some tweaks beyond the "spec" model. Hopefully some papers come soon instead of press releases.
They reference ESA's research in "Guidance and Control Nets", and when looking at ESA's page for their "Advanced Concepts Team" [0] they in turn reference ETH Zürich's research in RL for drone control. Specifically [1] this paper from 2023: "Champion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning" [2]. They use a 2x128 MLP for the control policy.
I assume that they shave off milliseconds by doing so, and a gyroscope (or similar) sends back the position/angle of the drone. And like this does it bypass the 'limited' onboard computer and instead uses a much better/faster computer?
Reports downthread suggest that the NN is running directly on the drone, in the form of a Jetson. Which would give much better latency and quality of video.
There's a few more details in the press release from the league itself. Sounds like they were really trying to put these things through their paces.
> The course design pushed the boundaries of perception-based autonomy—featuring wide gate spacing, irregular lighting, and minimal visual markers. The use of rolling shutter cameras further heightened the difficulty, testing each team’s ability to deliver fast, stable performance under demanding conditions
It used a small RL trained network running on the flight controllers MCU directly that controlled the motors given state (position, orientation ...) inputs. The Jetson handled vision processing.
I imagine the slower speed is a closer fit to combat drones (which have a payload and sometimes a fiber optic cable)? Also watching MultiGP they sorta move/accelerate too fast for me to fully appreciate the maneuvering.
Feels kinda similar to the innovation around manned aircraft about 100 years ago when we went from toy/observation platform to killing machine in only a couple of decades. With the ardupilot news today, it was hard to not watch this and imagine the applications to a combat environment.
> I imagine the slower speed is a closer fit to combat drones
A lot of comments are trying to draw connections to combat drones, but drone racing like this has been a hobby thing for a long time. The capabilities of the drones are set to have an even playing field, not to match combat drones or anything.
These aren't meant to have any parallels to combat drones, drones that fly long distances, or drones that carry payloads.
It's really just a special-purpose hobby thing for flying through a series of gates very quickly. Flight time measured in a couple minutes, no provisions for carrying weight.
We all understand that. People are simply observing that there an obvious path from this technology demonstrator to something similar in the battlefield.
I'm afraid not. RC/FPV is already a niche hobby, and media coverage is universally negative. No wonder laypeople mostly think of kamikaze drones when they see something like this.
> which is present on the drone and use direct IMU input and ESC commands from the Jetson
Does the jetson board even have the appropriate UARTs on it to talk directly to the ESCs? Your typical hobby grade 5" class size ESC (either 4-in-1 or discrete) cannot talk to two different controllers at the same time. If it's already wired to the four UART outputs from a 30x30 size flight controller (such as something STM32H7 based running betaflight), the ESC cannot be in communication with any other device.
Right, that was my point about the physical layout not really being conducive to NN-driven stabilization, on my cursory read.
Digging in, you could probably bitbang DShot on Orin GPIOs. It would be really sketchy since it's presumably running Linux on out-of-order cores with giant cache, so there's nothing close to realtime going on, but it's so damn fast that the theoretical problem probably doesn't matter and I bet it would work fine.
Orin also has "safety island" for ASIL applications which has lockstep Cortex-R52s. This would be ideal to run an integrated flight controller RTOS but it's supposedly fused off on consumer boards, lame. There's also a Cortex-R5 called "SPE" that could probably run a flight control RTOS as well.
Regardless of all of this theory craft, I was either totally wrong or accidentally right in two ways, depending on how you want to look at it: according to a sibling post, the STM32 board actually runs the NN-backed stabilization loop rather than a PID one! I've seen this done in research before but never in a meaningfully successful way, so I'm even more impressed now - as far as I can tell, it's _two_ novel solves, an actually working PID-or-better NN-based stabilization system on STM32 _and_ inside-out vision based flight planning for racing on the Nvidia board.
This is only a few days after the massive drone attack in Russia. Only a matter of time until we have drones smart enough to dodge bullets (or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing) while flying at breakneck speeds being controlled by AIs we don't fully understand.
The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?”
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”
It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
Vonnegut’s bleakness is not theoretical which gives it a specific bite. As POV Vonnegut cleaned up the shriveled remains of civilian victims of firebombing.
And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia. It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone battlefields.
I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare. Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one.
Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. They were the first to deploy the fiber-optic cable drones as an anti-ECM measure. And of course both sides are ordering parts from China.
A lot of money if you're a UK benefits recipient, not a lot of money for a piece of military equipment. Slightly more than the annual allowance of one asylum seeker.
Whole program is about a third of the cost of a Type 26 Frigate.
While I want to reduce the number, I can't but help think how we essentially create them in the first place by destroying the countries which create the economic conditions they flee from.
Asylum seekers are not fleeing bad economic conditions, or at least they are claiming not to. Also, we didn't create refugees from Syria or Ukraine - Syria and Russia did.
Kamikaze FPV drones starts from $400 (without warhead), from $1000 if it has 20km of optic fiber or is an interceptor. If it is not a kamikaze, like heavy bomber or reconnaissance - $10k+.
How much does 20km of optic fibre weigh? Why don't these fibre strands suffer from the same physical limits as cabling used in suspension bridges? To be clear: I am not doubting that multi-kilometer optic fibre controlled drones do not exist. There are plenty of highly quality news sources and YouTube videos about them.
It is priceless. It's not produced anymore. You can't exchange $100 million for new Tu-22M. Not exactly priceless, you probably can replicate the production by rebuilding the factories for every component and all related production chains. But that'll be much more than $100 million.
I hope this scares nations away from warfare altogether, given the unpredictability of outcomes with heavy drone usage. Even China: they may have a lot of the little buggers, but that Ukraine attack took a lot of scheming. I doubt China can out-manufacture human and AI trickery.
The conclusion is succinct and the stuff leading up to it of dubious quality.
"92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real
welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient
only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the
government officials and corporation executives who provide the
funds for research."
This is portrayed in Ministry for the Future which describes AI controlled swarms of small drones/bombs that fly apart and come together at their target and are almost impossible to stop.
I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.
It will likely come out somewhere in between our fears and our hopes. So it's good that we double down on imagining hopeful scenarios. Makes it easier to realize them.
Kim Stanley Robinson's books are all like that - a near/mid term crisis you can easily relate with, often caused by climate change, that eventually people rise up to kinda resolve, putting it on a hopeful trajectory. Lots of expressing of human best qualities along the way. Similar to the Culture in this.
well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other.
>The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
>or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing
just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.
They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)
Note for example, that Ukraine attack, although it caused no civilian casualties... it relied heavily on civilian infrastructure. Ukraine rented warehouses, common trucks, and hid the drones in normal shipping containers.
Thus indeed, this made the battlefield larger instead, now common trucks, warehouses and shipping containers are legitimate targets.
What Ukraine destroyed doesn't help either, for example they destroyed early warning airplanes intended to warn Russia if incoming missiles are nuclear or not. How Russia have to assume incoming missiles are nuclear, specially if they are flying in the regions where their land nuke detectors were destroyed too (I think 1 or 2 years ago Ukraine did that).
Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence. Now common trucks and containers are a threat as big as many advanced military hardware out there. A truck with a bunch of drones can open a hole in your nuclear defense as much as stealth planes were needed for this before.
>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's morale breaking, not by literally running out of soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for), most people would prefer to save their own lives rather than die for nothing.
So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on.
That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards.
---
And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.
They 'ran out of soldiers' because they were surrendering en masse. It's difficult to know the exact numbers on anything from that era because there are ambiguities and poor record keeping abounds, but it's estimated that some 11 million Germans ended up surrendering. [1]
So yeah as morale collapses you're left expanding the age of conscription, which further collapses morale. There were plenty of sardonic jokes about the Volkssturm, 'the people's brigade.' Why is the Volkssturm the state's most valuable resource? Because they have silver in their hair, gold in their teeth, and lead in their bones.
> This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale.
The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two years and provide education abilities for women afterwards. But in order to actually achieve change, you have to invest significantly more resources to actually build the foundations for a viable society: democracy, rule of law and an economic perspective for the populace.
In Germany, the Allied Forces stayed for about 45 years, two generations worth of time. Just think of the massive amount of money and resources invested... the first years were taken similarly to Afghanistan - depose the Hxtler regime and rebuild a rule of law afterwards and, as in the Luftbrücke, ensure basic survival. But then, they stayed in for over three decades to make sure that a healthy democracy would not just form but also establish and entrench itself against threats, and that Germany had an industrial base which was used to provide employment and income for the populace. Also, thank God for the Americans deciding not to follow the "Morgenthau plan" that proposed turning Germany into a purely agrarian state with no industrial capability ever again - that would have caused us to follow down the Afghanistan path with utter certainty.
In Afghanistan however, the situation after the immediate war and short post-war period was markedly different. The troops were locked up in their bases outside of bombing jihadists, which meant that local warlords had little to no oversight in their atrocities and stuff like "bacha bazi" (organized child sexual abuse) and slavery went on with effective impunity. The local puppet government barely had any income sources other than foreign aid (and selling opium on the black market) which meant there was no way to form a national identity and storytelling or even a common purpose, and a lack of oversight of the occupying forces over the puppet government led to widespread corruption and looting of the external investments, which led to it losing support across the country. And on top of that, we didn't even do decent oversight over our own troops. Abu Ghuraib is far from the only scandal that was barely prosecuted, not to mention all the other shit that was quietly swept under the rug - that led to the populace despising our troops even more.
We didn't lose Afghanistan because the Taliban are a strong army - they were and are not, just look at the videos from right after the takeover. We lost Afghanistan because we didn't give anyone in the wide population a reason to fight for themselves and not just submit to the next best warlord.
A war doesn't end when a government is deposed, it ends when resistance ceases (which is generally because morale breaks). Up until, and including, the final day of US withdrawal in Afghanistan the Taliban were fiercely resisting. US troops rarely left their little green zones because they would have been killed, same as in Iraq. The media stopped meaningful coverage of the war relatively quickly, which I think led people to believe that meaningful resistance wrapped up relatively quickly, but that's not the case at all. The Taliban ended up killing at least 75,000 soldiers/security forces and wounding what was likely some large multiple of that.
All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so. Americans would never tolerate US soldiers dying by the tens to hundreds of thousands as would have happened if we actually tried to enforce order on foot. So we were left with proxy soldiers, contractors, and a money printing machine. But that simply wasn't enough to defeat the Taliban, let alone carry out the grand changes you mention.
> All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so.
I disagree with this assessment.
Had the Western forces provided actual, proven economic opportunities for the people, the supply of "resistance" fighters would have dwindled. People don't become terrorists or insurgents just because, they follow that path because they do not see a gainful alternative to this life. (Side note, we're seeing this also in Palestine where Hamas and Fatah both draw a steady supply of recruits from the desperate)
Afghanistan has untold billions of dollars worth of all kinds of natural resources [1]. But no attempt was made, not even on paper, to exploit these natural resources. IMHO, even a single pilot project would have been a good start - a mine that pays a decent amount of money to the workers and the profits going to the national government as well as local authorities. Basically, show to the wide population that something good came around from all the suffering in the end, provide an alternative from the Taliban propaganda that at least promised salvation in the afterlife for killing infidels.
But no, we ignored this opportunity, which meant that other than "women can go to schools" we did not have any talking points available to counter the Taliban propaganda of "they're killing us with impunity and the puppet government is looting". That is how we truly lost, and what China and a bunch of oil sheiks will now enjoy.
There is no Afghanistan . There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords. "Afghanistan" hallucinated by the us, as a state does not exist and never has.
> There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords.
Germany used to be the same until 1871, a loose federation of fiefdoms that regularly went to war amongst each other. Fun fact, the tariff region structure [1] very much resembles a map from what was "Germany" before then [2].
It's not impossible to turn a bunch of small fiefdoms into one powerful entity. All you need is a compelling story and, as I wrote in this thread, some sort of economic incentive/perspective that actually shows to the population that the new government is actually better for their individual lives than what was before.
Well congrats they got that story, they repelled in order: the mongols, the greek, the chinese, the russians, the british, the russians, the americans and soon the chinese.
Are they the swiss yet ? Some ingredient is missing , the story aint it.
Up until the Soviet era, a lot of the natural resources Afghanistan has simply were not relevant, or maybe that fits it better, there were easier ways to acquire them than a country thousands of road (!) miles away from the powers that were.
The Soviets wanted Afghanistan for imperialist reasons, during the first Taliban era there were enough other sources that were more convenient, the Americans lacked the conviction and coherence to follow through... and now the Chinese are swooping in with money.
> It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way.
Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in people not voting for you come next election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places.
That's the problem. First order effect is of course good for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot more wars and battlefields in a less stable world.
And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough, and hard to "control" enough that it is available for organised crime you might see it used in assassinations, gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
> Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
I'm still concerned about the worst case scenario there being Microsoft getting their trusted computing wet dream. However I'm hopeful that it ends up being nothing more than embedded microscopic serial numbers in anything resembling a microcontroller, ID requirements to place purchases, and legal requirements for disposal (no more garage sale electronics).
The other scenario that I think might be more likely is radar and video surveillance covering every inch of every city and a related domestic agency capable of fielding rapid, tightly targeted anti-aircraft measures on a large scale.
Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it.
In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service.
This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
> This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0] while mandatory military service was still in place [1]. The conscripts did not play a role in protecting democracy.
Decision-making in the armed forces is always performed by a "warrior class". The people who operate heavy war machinery are also career soldiers; conscripts are light infantry.
And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory military service. It only makes sense in the context of a small country (in terms of population) bordering a large aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly) Canada.
Armed forces culture is also incredibly important. Goal/mission oriented organizations are harder to co-opt than top-down command structure organizations.
This is similar to the argument behind the American constitutional right to own guns.
In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the training, organisation and weaponry of the professional military will be able to beat them in contemporary circumstances.
I realise military service means people have some training, but as much as the professionals? What about air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can react.
Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?
An insurgency doesn’t report to a battlefield to be slaughtered by the professional army. To see what a large-scale American resistance would look like, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan are instructive.
The people doing the mandatory military service is the army. There is no army without the mass army.
They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily people who stay for longer than their military service.
Maybe it's unrelated to the thread topic, but the benefit of the American 2 amendment system is that the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript. Maybe this would have prevented the war with Ukraine
The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces.
Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as much as anything, a way to reduce the temptation to rely on those instead of summoning a posse (for law enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary), rather than a way to prevent conscription.
> were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted
If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds. That said I think there's plenty of evidence that your first claim is false depending on how you define the particulars of "deny the state".
> If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds.
No, the claim that the purpose of the second amendment was to assure that the state could rely on a citizen militia for internal and external security instead of denying them that ability and forcing them to rely on professional forces is not at all at odds with the claim that large professional internal and external security forces were not something that the framers trusted.
Your excerpting a verb phrases from each of the two claims to claim a conflict while ignoring the rest of the claims may suggest the source of your misreading -- because you seen to think that the thing that I said that the 2A was not meant to deny the states was the same thing the framers didn't trust, rather than something that was an alternative to it.
The excerpting was to minimize comment length, nothing more. That said I do see now where I rather catastrophically misread your earlier comment. I agree with what you wrote.
However in context it seems wrong because regardless of intent one of the effects of an armed populace is that a sufficiently unpopular conscription is going to carry serious physical risks for those in power. With regards to the framers I'd expect such a scenario to be classified as government tyranny and marked NOTABUG.
I'd suggest that the answer to the person you responded to is that the conscriptions that happened in the US weren't sufficiently unpopular to motivate such drastic measures.
Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing their national service, and the career soldiers (who are the people likely to start a coup)?
In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.
The career soldiers are recruited from people doing their mandatory military service, and upon this, many people having done their mandatory military service are part of the home defence and practice now and then.
About your last paragraph: High level, I generally agree, but when you dive deeper to look at the numbers, I doubt that you can have 1000 USD drones that can fly at 200 mph/320 km/h. One quarter of that speed, I could believe.
"And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing."
You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now, terrorists.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
I agree with your other points, but this only helps with (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.
Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.
Combined arms is the probable solution for a Ukraine type war. As soon as your expensive laser lights up, it's got a couple of minutes to move before artillery shells arrive.
Of course deeper into Russia that's safe .. but instead you have the problem of a huge area to cover. You can protect a few high value targets but not everywhere. Consider something like the early stages of the Iraq war: target every single civilian electrical substation and petrol station with a drone bombing.
Yeah, an artillery strike, a smoke screen, or fog. I'm also reading the target needs to be stationary or its movements predictable; unpredictable evasive maneuvers should be easy enough to implement (at the cost of speed/range). Plus there's the cost of the device itself, while it says it costs $3 per shot, it's still an (up to) 100 kw device + sensors + power supply setup. It doesn't say how much the system itself costs or its maintenance.
Or attack while it rains. Sure, a laser is great for defending Southern California or a place in the Middle East, but not so great for defending Great Britain
I always hear this sneak up thing and think about how birds can be caught with netting. And all the barbed wire in old battlefields. I don't think drones will be able to meaningfully sneak up to a laser.
Of course more drones works. But more drones here is less drones there. It means lasers are an effective deterrent against opportunistic attacks.
Both Russia and Ukraine are putting up netting around the roads near the frontlines. Wire-guided drones are able to fly close enough to the ground to avoid it.
My theory is that there will be pernicious netting around lasers, and any sneaking drones will tangle themselves up far from the laser. So only straight mass attacks will work. If you have but 10 drones you'll be unlikely to take out a laser I'd say.
The problem is the asymmetry. Drones are cheap, can be produced in huge numbers, and can be deployed anywhere by anyone. You can't put laser defences on every target, and the best laser defence could still be overwhelmed by a sufficient number of drones.
Drones still have the limiting factor that is that they need to be produced at all as a piece of technology. Artillery shell on the other hand has all the explosive bits needed to make that drone blow up half your house, only it is a dummy round being fired from technology that has been globally solved and replicated for what over 100 years now, with huge stocks of surplus available along with popular rudimentary designs used by various guerillas around the world.
Increasingly we are also seeing a world where the technology to shape a cultures mind share can be deployed with a few dozen lines of code and a malware bot net rather than a sophisticated and well funded mass media operation a la the 1960s western cultural revolution supported in part by the CIA. You don't even need to blow up the enemies country, you can convince them it is in their best interest to be subjugated and they will remove their own naysayer internally and roll out the carpet for you when you arrive and proclaim your regional Obergruppenführer to meet production quotas.
a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3 ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph? not an easy situation.
ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second? maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.
Plus artillery shells, cruise missiles, high altitude balloons and various other ways to fill the sky with literally tons of foil, chaff, tiny bits of wire, smoke, ball bearings, blaring radio transmitters, balsa wood dummy gliders, whatever is hoped to disrupt the targeting long enough to sneak something nitrogen-rich near to the fiddly optics.
And ultimately there's the cost factor. Drones can be mass produced for cheap, laser systems are specialized and expensive. Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in development) is drone swarms, one operator directing a squad of a hundred drones like it's an RTS game. Only one grenade or kamikaze drone needs to detonate close enough to a laser system to take it out of action. Mind you, the system has a range of up to 10 kilometers, so if the drones are detected from that far out there's enough time to take them all out.
It seems like the power source required for a portable laser system makes it very cumbersome. Why not just use a fleet of very low cost anti-drone drones? They can be "AI-powered" to seek out enemy drones and try to damage them or throw a net on them.
I do think we will see more and more laser systems installed on large naval vessels as an alternative to close-in weapon system (CIWS), which, in practice, has not been very effective against missile attacks.
The issue with anti-drone drones is that mid-air interception of a fast moving object by another fast moving object is an incredibly difficult problem from a physics perspectives - especially when one of those objects is actively trying to dodge. If you add in a requirement that the drone must be captured in a non-destructive way, it’s only going to be possible with the lamest consumer drones.
The way air-air missiles typically work is massive fragmentation warheads and proximity detonation. Even then, it doesn’t always work.
The pro however is that the interceptor can position itself somewhat arbitrarily, and there doesn’t need to be ongoing line of sight from the initial detection point. In some cases (theatre radar systems, standoff radar systems), they may not even need to be able to see the target drone until they’re within detonation range. (Think ‘hides behind a random bush until they’re within detonation range of the target drone as it tries to zip by, then explodes with no warning’).
Then of course the attacking drones will add randomness to their attack patterns.
Lasers have the advantage that it’s essentially impossible to dodge a laser beam (speed of light meaning that for objects within the ranges we’re talking about are lazed the moment the laser turns on), so it’s purely an aiming/detection/line of sight issue. But they have the disadvantage that if the drone gets out of the line of sight, it’s completely ineffective. So they’ll need to be placed at locations that overlook large areas and have good visibility towards the entire potential approach area, which makes them vulnerable to artillery, massed attacks, etc.
Well, at least we know what shape the new arms race is taking!
The issue with anti-drone drones is that mid-air interception of a fast moving object by another fast moving object is an incredibly difficult problem from a physics perspectives - especially when one of those objects is actively trying to dodge.
The advantage of course is that the interceptor can position itself arbitrarily, and there doesn’t need to be ongoing line of sight from the initial detection point.
Lasers have the advantage that it’s essentially impossible to dodge a laser beam (speed of light meaning that for objects within the ranges we’re talking about are lazed the moment the laser turns on), so it’s purely an aiming/detection/line of sight issue. But they have the disadvantage that if the drone gets out of the line of sight, it’s completely ineffective.
Well, at least we know what shape the new arms race is taking!
> Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in development) is drone swarms
Various entities related to the US military have been simulating and physically testing various approaches to that for years. There are blurbs in the press here and there. In some cases source code even got published (not clear if that was intentional though).
The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make.
We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.
Yes, and so far it's much easier to drive a van into a crowd of people. Nobody has tried to mandate tech in cars that detects and prevents such malicious behavior.
Vehicles are registered and licensed to tie them to specific owners. You are required to provide a identification/drivers license when renting a vehicle. The largest, most dangerous vehicles like semi-trucks have additional restrictions on licensing and access. There is a pretty robust system in place to reduce unattributable crimes using vehicles.
Even without vulnerabilities like that, something like https://comma.ai/openpilot could very likely be used in the same way ArduPilot was used in the recent Ukrainian drone attacks.
> A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example.
America insists on making sure that guns are universally available so that school shootings can still happen. Doesn't register. The death toll seems to be politically acceptable.
Well yes, but that's a utopian idea that can never be fully realised. You can't fix them all. There'll always be some number of crazy, broken, malevolent psychos out there. If you don't think this is true then you need to meet more people.
We need to minimise the damage they can cause, and that means preventing them from using slaughterbots.
the premise is that the person doing it is very mentally ill. the question, "why would they do that when they could do something else that makes more sense?", doesn't make a lot of sense itself under the premise.
If a person is very ill mentally then there are already many ways to kill people in numbers, some of which ways are much more accessible than slaughterbots.
I mean... yeah, that’s a definite possibility. If a lunatic has access to explosives, there’s an infinite number of ways they could do that.
The hard part is that there is no effective way to regulate anything in the supply chain involved except for the explosives themselves. Everything else is super commoditized at this point and, other than the props, very multi-purpose. The first significant hexcopter I built used a BeagleBone Blue for processing, generic ESCs and BLDCs for the motors, and an aluminum frame that I cut out of aluminum tubes from Home Depot. Max takeoff weight was 55lb, because that’s the heaviest it could legally take off with. This was 7 years ago.
If one is a lunatic, there are easy to find recipes for making bulk (albeit dangerous to be around) explosives.
one thing in societies favor though - sufficiently unstable lunatics tend to self delete themselves in various ways by being unstable lunatics. few tend to be in the “sweet” spot of dangerous lunatics who are stable and focused enough to follow through successfully with a dangerous plan. thankfully.
For example - most people who could synthesize multi-kilo quantities of TATP without blowing themselves up and successfully build a DIY drone to carry it have better and more productive things to do with their lives. at least in the west.
I'm sure that everyone would agree on that, and that $bad_actor wouldn't take advantage of the fact that everyone else had agreed to lay down their arms. Game theory sucks, but it's hard to get around.
As if the billionaires won't simply go "F that noise, more money for me!!!" Ethical concerns are way down the priority list for most AI focused companies.
There wouldn't be any pin in it. Drones - automated weapons in the wide sense - will be the new MAD/equalizer weapon accessible to smaller countries who have no chances of getting into the nuclear club. Without such a weapon in the coming new world order - marked specifically by the USA's withdrawal from enforcing international law - they will be an easy prey to the bigger countries. Ukraine is just a preview of that equalizing power.
They don’t need to dodge bullets. Just make them small, cheap, fast, and powerful enough to fly to a target and punch a single bullet perfectly through their skull in an instant. Launch a swarm for redundancy. And because they are autonomous, these drones can be entirely unaffected by radio signals once deployed.
Politicians will never go outside again. The only defense is to be loved by all and have no enemies. Or, the more likely scenario: disguises and full anonymity.
A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target.
Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.
You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it is still a hit.
These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier to get than it used to be but they are still in wide use.
> Технологія нова, потребує вдосконалення і масштабування.
> Eng: "The technology is new and will need improvement and scaling"
I don't understand what you're trying to prove. They do exist and I never said they don't. They keep popping up here and there, mainly working in demo conditions against static contrast targets.
My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption. Maybe some, but there's some of everything in this war. All the main uav units that I'm aware of use manually controlled fpvs and there are reasons for that.
> These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier
> My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption.
Make that point, then! Nothing in your original comment suggested this, just hostile dismissal.
Now that you’ve written a more substantive comment I think we actually agree overall. Most operations in the Ukraine-Russia war are manual piloting. Autonomy is over-hyped overall so far. However! A large number of autonomous systems have still been deployed and interest in autonomy is only growing. Both things can be true at the same time.
> Oh gosh.
Come on, read the whole sentence please. Lock on targeting modules are absolutely being superseded by fiber optic as it becomes “easier” to acquire than it used to be.
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev... was posted by a sibling commenter and is a fairly accurate summary to my knowledge, including a substantiation of the notion that depending on how you look at it, lock on modules were a stop-gap before fiber became available or fiber is a stop-gap before good autonomy becomes widespread.
Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment.
Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here.
Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.
As if the US can compete with china on drone numbers or quality. If drones are the future of war, China will have an enormous advantage in a future war. Let's hope it never comes to that.
Agree 100%, it's a funny strategy but also shows how weak the US hand is - China can pump out extraordinary numbers of these things, and they have pretty incredible tech talent. I wish I didn't live in such interesting times.
What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece.
But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!"
Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
"when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity.
Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations.
But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.
So I think we’re on the same page when it comes to the layperson’s ignorance on the subject, and I agree the term is mostly useless. I also agree that quadcopters aren’t the endgame of future warfare, although I’ve been entirely shocked at how effective they’ve been so far.
I don’t really put much stock in your average person’s take on warfare generally, so I’m not too bothered by the torrent of misunderstanding. You see the same thing with AI/AGI, and much of it is fueled by those garnering for clicks.
I will say I missed in my original response that the OP was taking exclusively about autonomous devices, and in that case I would agree with their take.
Dude, it's not a prediction, it's what is currently happening. If you follow active drone units (from both sides) you'll see that they're all controlled by operators until the last frame.
These bombers attacks were done with manual control too. These drones had LTE modems and on footage it's clearly visible that they controlled by operator.
People can't read these days, especially if it doesn't match the reality they build in their heads.
Oh I see - emphasis on the 'autonomous' part, yeah I would agree on that for today. Things are pretty immature on the autonomous side right now, but that will definitely change ... it's still the military, so it'll take a while, but they'll do it when they're forced to.
An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1].
"Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology."
One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems.
Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
Most of the conversation here is focused on cheap drones. Are there cheap Inertial Navigation Systems (INS)? As I understand, it only appears inside of multi-million dollar cruise/ballistic missiles, fighter jets, and long-range bombers. Please correct me if I am wrong. Also, it might be that there are cheap INS systems that are good enough (e.g., "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"), plus a bit of AI-enabled vision on the drone camera.
Yes, you can buy an IMU as a single IC for less than $5[1]. Otherwise your smartphone probably already have all the required sensors.
Of course, those have significantly less performance than the one you put in an
airliner or ballistic missile.
As you mention yourself, its a question of good enough. You need to be a lot more accuracy to hit a city after a twenty minute sub-orbital coast, than to find the nearby trench.
And yes, computer vision is used to correct for drift.
Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.
> Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed
Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
> there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones
As long as you define ‘drone’ as a tiny quadrotor. Missiles like Sidewinder and Hellfire, cruise missiles like Tomahwak, fire-and-forget MANPADs, GPS-guided gravity bombs, even ICBMs with MIRV warheads. All autonomously travel to their target and destroy it.
There are even some loitering anti-tank missiles that climb up above the launching aircraft and sit on a parachute for a while until they see a tank to destroy. The pilot never has to see the tank.
All autonomous and adopted.
The main novelty in the electric drone tech is very very low cost.
There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.
Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.
The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones.
Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.
FPVs are the most distinctive element in Russian-Ukrainian war, changing many traditional war dogmas. So far AI in this war wasn't heavily used, FPVs are controlled by humans at both sides. I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but it'll be utilised by military operations to kill more people, to conduct terror acts, controlled from afar. It allows weak players to have more leverage which is not always a good thing, and certainly disrupts power balance. Think about Al-Qaeda bringing a truck of explosive drones to Washington DC and unleashing them at White House, all autonomous, with cameras guiding the way.
I don't know, this drone race is to combat drones what F1 racing is to self driving cars. In order to win in these races, you just need to precisely control speed around well-defined turns and stuff. You don't need to adapt to a new environment. It's not surprising to me that a computer program would win in such a controlled environment.
> It allows weak players to have more leverage
I think it depends on the dominant type of defensive counter-technology used. If it's something with high capital costs like a laser or a microwave, then it will centralize combat because the USA could invest in the infrastructure needed to defeat terrorists, but not the reverse.
On the other hand, if you can effectively destroy these things with birdshot, then it may not be a problem for humanity at large. I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone.
For example look at the iron dome: it is effective defense measure but very difficult to scale up to counter ICBMs.
>I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone.
The cost of a FPV quadcopter is pennies on the dollar cost of a defense system. You can 3D print a dozen frames in hours with a decent printer. Its just bolt on the parts and do a quick function test with a script or controller and its ready for action.
What point are you trying to make. Because the iron dome is hideously expensive. It costs so much more then the missiles it intercepts that it's worth it for terrorists to fire on israel purely to waste their money.
The iranian icbms from Yemen gets shot down by other systems. I don't think they are scaled up versions of the iron dome. What's interesting is the lack of confidence israel has in predicting their trajectory. They usually send up multiple interceptors for a single missile and put sirens on for half the country.
The only really economical counter i've heard of is lasers but it doesn't look like they are coming any time soon.
I've got no idea what method Israel uses to counter drones, but they certainly have struggled with them.
My absolute nightmare scenario is Iran via its proxies unleashing swarms of autonomous kamikaze drones in population centres.
You're right i didn't know that. They are using lasers to fry drones, but not yet against missiles, even though the iron beam was announced 10 years ago. It sounds like the system is still being developed/rolled out. It will be great when it works because finally Israel will have an interceptor that's cheaper then the target.
> I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but ...
It unfortunately goes even deeper than that. The Quadcopter FPV community is watching their open source software actively be picked up for warfare, and can often tell what version they were running when watching released Russian & Ukrainian footage later.
Every beneficial step we make in the maker community will be used to expedite death in conflict. A few 3D printers and a digikey order are all you really need to seed an insurgent movement at this point.
Oh man, can anyone imagine a non-Terminator scenario for this?
Update: I'm not saying people shouldn't develop this, we're never going to squash human curiosity. But when I see this kind of stuff, I'm deeply troubled by how bad actors (state and non-state) will use this.
I hope our security services are working hard on countering these potential threats.
Im more worried about these type of things causing us to blast each other and ourselves back to the 1920s or so during conflicts when small explosive EMPs start being viewed as less damaging than drones and robots. A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast. The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage, but if drone bombs represent even more damage they become viable. Yeah it will destroy all the radios around and fuck up a bunch of expensive equipment, but you would still have soldiers with guns rather than just smoking craters.
Nobody really uses much undirected EM warfare in my opinion because it represents a huge escalation in a war, similar to the use of indiscriminate chemical weapons, or even nuclear weapons.
It would be devastating in the local battlefield, potentially frying radio or other equipment depending on the size of the device or how close you could lob it towards the enemy before going off; but with the low wattages many non-military communication devices use today you would also be blasting horrible noise to all of them beyond the local area and disrupting communications across potentially multiple neutral countries.
It would be a large act of aggression against any countries around them and NATO, and at scale possibly even piss off far away countries like the US and China. Especially large EMP devices could even be temporarily misidentified as a nuclear explosion and gain the immediate full attention by any nuclear powers watching out for it.
You could do EMP, but you could also do some sort of point-defense turret. Drones are lightweight and fragile, so it doesn't need to be big - just fast and auto-targeting.
Didn't they try this in Ukraine and it doesn't work? Any point installation is quickly overwhelmed. The only answer to FPV drones so far seems to be more FPV drones. Though they're not using fully-autonomous drones in Ukraine yet, so that might still play out.
“[As of May 2025] Ukraine has developed and successfully tested the Sky Sentinel – an AI-powered, fully automated turret designed to shoot down Russian drones and missiles… the M2 is known to have an effective range of 1.5 kilometers against airborne threats. Each unit costs approximately $150,000. Developers estimate that protecting a city would require 10 to 30 turrets… Given that each Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone used by Russia costs around $100,000, Sky Sentinel offers a scalable and cost-effective solution to a persistent and deadly threat.”
Yes, a wall of $150,000 bushmasters with some servos can take hurl enough lead in the air to protect a city from a single gulf-war era $100,000 lawnmower engine on two meter wings bumbling in a straight line at jogging pace.
We’re currently in the “a shipping container on a semi can could launch dozens of $2000 racing quads with molotov cocktails zip-tied to the bottom with enough agility to thread a needle faster than a turret can swing its own mass”
And the writing is on the wall for some near-future “any nation state could drop sci-fi cluster bombs that shed ten-thousand 250gram racing quads that can overwhelm even the most advanced point defence just by numbers and it’ll be cheaper than a conventional 2000lb bomb”
>with enough agility to thread a needle faster than a turret can swing its own mass
If it has a range of 1.5km, then the drone needs to be moving really fast in order to move a couple of degrees per second.
If it's going like 80mph, then that's 36m/s, which comes out to <1.4 degrees/s at 1500m away. For 1000m, you get ~2 degrees/s. Not to mention that this velocity is at a right angle to the turret, and you have to close the distance.
I feel like search and rescue after an earthquake where a drone swarm can canvas and categorize if it saw movement or not is one possible "non-bad" use.
Fire departments and police in Germany are deploying more and more drone units, too.
Firefighters use them to search for missing persons but also to get aerial images and a better overview of larger scenes as "running around" is often not possible or doesn't help that much with the overview.
Police is using them to take pictures of accidents. It's easier to see tire marks and the whole "history" of an accident from above. Really reduces their time on a scenery to take pictures of everything.
If by burrito you mean shaped charge high explosives with lethal shrapnel, triggered by facial recognition, delivered by drones the size of house sparrows at the speed of sound, then yes, burrito delivery.
The speed and flawlessness is quite impressive considering it is being resolved with what I imagine is noisy inertial data and a motion blurred CCD camera.
Looks like most of the comments here are about the use as weapons and the possible dangers. I believe "Slaughterbots" is the canonical sci-fi video on the subject, and it appears to be aging pretty well. Unfortunately…
The sci-fi novel I wrote sacrifices commercial art considerations to portray the future of war more realistically. All the robots are one-shot, one-kill and all action takes place faster than human reaction time. The most humans do is approve battle plans. This is already the case largely in the Ukraine/Russia war, and now we're seeing that human FPV operators will soon be obsolete. Realistic sci-fi movies are going to be not have much action in the future. Things will have to be about careful political maneuvering, like in totalitarian country politics. You can't win against robots unless you are using other robots.
I remember being blown away by a TED talk were "minimum snap trajectories" are planned for quadcopters to fly through hoops and slots.
It's really cool to see this happening fully autonomously and at such high speed. I wonder if the use of AI means that the approach is fundamentally different, or if it uses the same principle of minimizing snap?
It's fundamentally different, it's using an RL trained network that gets the drone state (position, orientation, velocity) as input and directly outputs motor commands.
I’ve seen AI beat humans in simulations before, but doing it on a real track with the same hardware is honestly kind of amazing.
What surprised me the most is they didn’t use any traditional flight controller. They just let the neural network handle the flying.
I’m really curious how this would perform in messier, less controlled environments.
Human sports remain interesting when the humans are notably worse at whatever they do than a machine purpose built for it, or indeed wildlife that specialised for this.
Usain Bolt was the fastest human sprinter in the world, but compared to a good motorcycle over paved road he's obviously not very fast, and likewise compared to an emu. Nevertheless, Bolt's 100m performance drew big crowds, even though people also watch Motorcycle racing and (I think?) Emu racing.
It's like speed running, the categories are arbitrary and self-selecting. Why the Modern Pentathlon? Why not. Why Super Mario Warpless? Why not. If everybody wanted to do Super Mario, only the odd numbered levels and also you must kill all the enemies, that's what the run is, our choices are arbitrary and we value whatever we like.
Yes. People thought computers would kill chess, but despite current chess engines being able to trounce every human in existence, chess is more popular than ever.
This makes me wonder what the "best" vehicle for human racing would be like, if there was no requirement for a human driver.
Let's say your task is to move a human from A to B (by a pre-designated route) as fast as possible. The only conditions are vehicle weight, no outside radio contact and no damaging the road (assume each vehicle goes separately, so e.g. slip stream effects don't matter). You can rely on the human to drive or use AI, you can go on the ground or fly through the air, anything is allowed. What would be the best way to do this?
Well .. it depends on other assumptions, like the amount and type of energy allowed (continuous gigawatt electricity access during the trip ?), amount of "roughness" the human can sustain during the trip (canonball a human packed in an big airbag ?), actual budget limit for the project, etc ....
Let's not forget that this works solely for this particular racing setup.
If you change a single gate, the AI they are using would not be able to adapt.
Still fascinating, though.
I have been involved in research focused on ML control for some time, and believe me, I would love to see an AI model capable of controlling arbitrary systems at different operating points or in different environments. However, it is simply not feasible yet. This AI drone is no different, especially because reinforcement learning was used to train the model, which is generally not practical for real-world systems due to disturbance variables and the continuous need for adaptability.
I don't think so. The article says the race track was controlled by the race organisers but not that it wasn't known to the participants before the race.
Anyway given the state of the art, flying autonomously at great speeds and beating human champions without pre-training, i.e. on an unknown race track, would be a much bigger breakthrough than just beating some human champions (which has already happened except in a less official environment). You can rest assured that if that was what the team achieved, the article would be telling us all about it.
Shoot, you're totally right. They had no prior knowledge before the event, but I don't know how they teach it the course. There's more than one gate visible at a time, so they must do something to fine-tune it.
That being said, I'm sure they have a base model too, so I'm right back to wondering about the parent question: would it work if you set it down in front of a few fresh gates?
> Where does it say they had no prior knowledge before the event? I can't find that in the text. Is it in the video?
Reading back through it, I'm synthesizing this statement. It's never said explicitly, and I could very well be wrong.
I'm combining the knowledge that the novel development here is that the event supervisors control the track with the fact they're showing off a training run in their video.[0] The video also links a few papers from the teams past that have some additional clues.[1][2]
> The reason for this mostly lies in the real-world aspects of the competitions. They take place in environments previously unknown by the teams, with no opportunity for benign, solution-specific changes, and little time for adapting the developed solution to the environment in situ. Moreover, competitions often pose a more challenging environment, with gates located slightly differently than on the precommunicated maps or even moving during the race, unforeseen lighting effects optimized for spectators rather than for drones, and large crowds of moving people around the flight arena.
This makes it sound like they're at least given the layout.
Note this was from a different competition (Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing by Lockheed, with DRL) back in 2019. The other paper is from 2024, but I don't have access.
It looks like the reason it won is due to a human pilot crashing into the obstacle. Not exactly an unfair problem, but worth mentioning that it was close until human mistakes were made.
1. I didn't see it stated explicitly, but I presume the neural net is on the far end of a radio link somewhere, not running on hardware physically mounted on the drone?
2. After viewing the FPV video on the linked page: how the hell do human pilots even come close to this pace? Insane (even assuming that the video they're seeing is higher quality than what's shown on YouTube – is it?)
3. The control software has access to an IMU. This seems to represent some degree of unfair advantage? I presume the human pilots don't have that – unless the IMU data is somehow overlaid onto their FPV view (but even then, I can't imagine how much practice would be needed to learn to make use of that in realtime).
1) No, this is interesting specifically because it was all onboard, the drone has Jetson Orin NX on it.
2) No, the video the pilot sees is usually quite bad. Racing pilots usually use either HDZero (mid resolution video with weird pixel artifacts sometimes) or analog video (looks like a broken 1980s VCR). It’s amazing what they can fly through. These DCP spec drones are also slow by racing standards. Look up MultiGP racing, it’s even faster.
3) It can be overlaid but it’s useless. The human pilot is using the control sticks as the input to an outer rate regulation loop which contains the gyro as input to an inner stabilization loop though, so the IMU is still in the mix for human control.
2. The video they're seeing is worse. Spectators typically see the frames saved directly from the camera, but the pilot will be seeing them compressed and beamed over the air to their headset. See vid.
3. The human pilots do actually have access to it. Not directly, but the flight controller translates their inputs and makes use of the IMU to do so.
I’m reminded of when the US military figured out it should just replace all its proprietary field drone controllers with Xbox controllers because every single grunt that enlisted already had 10,000 hours on the things. If the future of warfare is drones, Christ, that video is terrifying.
Funny you should say that. Gamepads are not quite what you want for drone piloting for three main reasons:
1. Less precise. Gimble size matters.
2. All inputs sprung. This is exactly what you want for your three rotational axis, but you absolutely do not want your throttle resetting to 50% when you lay off. You can fix this using 3D mode where the zero setting is in the middle, but then you lose even more precision.
3. Circular inputs. This means at low or high throttle you have less roll available.
The main reason you'd want a gamepad is the size and shape. They do make gamepad-style radios, like the Radiomaster Pocket, which combine the best of both worlds.
You can pick up a simulator for $10-20 if anyone wants to give it a whirl, and many are even on Steam, but the general recommendation is to pick up a dedicated radio as soon as possible.
Note that this mainly applies to FPV quadcopters, due to how sensitive and twitchy they can be. When it comes to controlling pretty much anything else (I'd argue even most planes) these advantages are no longer relevant.
The US military is not limited to using stock COTS hardware. They have imitated the form factor and general feel of those controls, but custom built and ruggedized.
This technological breakthrough is truly amazing, especially the fact that the drone can fly on an actual race track independently, without relying on human control. It's really cool.
But honestly, as AI gets better at doing what we can do, even better in some cases, it makes me a little uneasy. Will there come a day when we truly become redundant, with AI taking over the work?
> Flying drones faster will be important for many economic and societal applications, ranging from delivering blood samples and defibrillators in time to finding people in natural disaster scenarios
Meanwhile, many defense companies are quietly watching this racing achievement far far away through their palantíri orb researching who built that autonomous drone.
> This is more than just a racing win. The smart lightweight AI that powered the drone could help all kinds of future robots, making them faster, more efficient, and better at...
I man at this point, given what we know I'm sure someone smart can connect some dots and describe what's inevitable with 99% confidence just in the next year or two in terms of society right?
10 years.. But yeah. Just wait until these things can move through space with physical/gyro sensors on their own, at affordable costs. When orin nano super is the cost of an Esp32 (and the size of).
No gps, no fiber, no 5g, no jamming except microwaves. A python file and a target.
>>Just wait until these things can move through space with physical/gyro sensors on their own,
and better guidance software. Yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement
"Traditional waypoint navigation assumes movement through a series of Cartesian positions. But in pursuit dynamics, for example, what matters is directional alignment over time"
What do you mean just wait until? The entire point of TFA is that AI is controlling the motors directly and not using some human input device. So I guess it's just wait until you actually read TFA and watch the embedded video?
Why? Just request a Waymo, and then put your suitcase nuke in the backseat and watch it be delivered by AI. There's all sorts of ways to kill with AI without needing drones
Ironically the hard part of that is still more "suitcase nuke" than "last mile delivery".
I'm mildly suprised that the US hasn't seen a breakout of car bombs since Oklahoma City or WTC. It seems that the tradition force of using guns for the frequent mass casualty suicide terrorism events is too strong.
Guns are easy to get, they’re portable, they’re easy to use, and they are stable and safe to operate. Bombs are pretty much none of those things. Bombs are not sold at your local Walmart or sporting goods store, they don have weekend bomb shows at your local convention centers, they require some skill to make, the raw ingredients are tracked at point of sale, and to have the same casualty count tends to require a large amount. It doesn’t take much reasoning to understand why guns are the goto choice
goodgooglymoogly, some people just are not creative thinkers at all. you think someone with the ability of creating a suitcase nuke isn't going to have the means to have a fake identity specifically for this purpose? or just steal someone else's? or being willing to make that sacrifice so being anonymous isn't a requirement?
Drones seem a lot easier and more flexible than all that. And you could operate them at scale. I’m not particularly concerned about weapons in the hands of an isolated criminal. That already exists everywhere. I’m concerned about sophisticated organizations
Yeah I man with each day the chance of a shocking event increases to 100% with predictable outcomes. But yeah thats what I'm thinking of .. there has to be a finite number of dimensions for this and related technologies in terms of use and impact (legal, economics, PR, military, political etc), some are fuzzier than others but some should be pretty clear for some analyst to share..
I got out of doing drone work because of all the FAA restrictions on where you can fly drones now. Within 30 miles of a major metro area? Nope. Within 20 miles of an airport? Nope. I'm exaggerating of course, but it got to a point where I was having real problems trying to find areas where you can fly a drone just for fun so I just gave up and quit.
My more immediate fear would be how the gov can control who and where these drones will be able to fly. If some revolutionary built a swarm of drones, it would be pretty easy (I would think) for the gov to just jam the signal and shut them down.
The parts? I'm not worried about.
Its the gov holding the keys to access that makes me more worried.
Jam what signal? You'd need a HERF gun to stop an autonomous drone -- a real one, not something made from recycled microwave oven parts -- and an EMP bomb of some sort to stop a swarm of them.
Uh, jamming has been used since the beginning of the Russian/Ukrainian war. Its literally one of the main areas that has become a game of cat and mouse on both sides.
The Black Eye is a suitcase-sized radio noisemaker that can muddle the signals that control all but the best fiber-optic drones. According to an electronic warfare expert who writes under the pseudonym “Roy,” Black Eye can ground surveillance and attack drones from as far as 4 kilometers away, “when located high enough.”
Unlike many other jammers, which target the drone, the Black Eye targets the drone’s operator—blocking a drone’s command signal at its source. The new jammer “is appearing across the whole front,” Roy wrote. “This is a serious development for Ukraine.”
Kvertus’ innovative EW backpack system provides Ukrainian troops with a mobile counter-drone shield for just $7,000. Operating in the 720-1050 MHz range, it jams and disables threatening Russian drones.
The US govt has been working on countering autonomous drones for years now.
The Department is mitigating the potential negative effects of unmanned systems on U.S. forces, assets, and installations – at home and abroad. A critical portion of our efforts, particularly in the near-term, comes from improving our defenses, with an emphasis on detection as well as active and passive defenses
Its been working on countering drones (unmanned systems) for years; most of the drone threat it has been focused on is not autonomous but remotely-controlled. But there is considerable overlap in countermeasures (other than ones that target the control channel of remotely controlled drones.)
This is quite cool since past efforts in this direction have usually relied on crutches like outside-in imaging and positioning.
A few details I picked up:
* The drones are a spec drone across the league. It's a fairly large-footprint FPV racing drone (it's a 5" propped drone, but it's very stretched out and quite heavy) with both a Betaflight flight controller and a Jetson Orin NX onboard. Teams were only allowed an IMU and a single forward camera.
* It's unclear to me whether the teams were allowed to bypass the typical Betaflight flight controller which is present on the drone and use direct IMU input and ESC commands from the Jetson, or whether they were sending and receiving commands from the flight controller and relying on its onboard rate stabilization PID loop.
DCL is kind of a weird drone racing league since it's made for TV; it's mostly simulator based with, more recently, only few real events a year. The spec DCL drone isn't very capable compared to the more open-specification drones in racing leagues like MultiGP, in large part to keep the events more spectator friendly. This probably makes it more amenable to AI, which is an interesting side effect.
From near the bottom:
> One of the core new elements of the drone’s AI is the use of a deep neural network that doesn’t send control commands to a traditional human controller, but directly to the motors.
I saw that too - I'm assuming it means they're indeed using the DNN for stabilization. This has been done several times over the years, but generally with results which only rival PID and don't surpass it, so that's quite interesting. What's odd is that the physical architecture of the drone doesn't really make sense for this, so there must be some tweaks beyond the "spec" model. Hopefully some papers come soon instead of press releases.
They reference ESA's research in "Guidance and Control Nets", and when looking at ESA's page for their "Advanced Concepts Team" [0] they in turn reference ETH Zürich's research in RL for drone control. Specifically [1] this paper from 2023: "Champion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning" [2]. They use a 2x128 MLP for the control policy.
[0] https://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/
[1] https://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/projects/rl_vs_imitation_learnin...
[2] https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/257405/
This is crazy, its dexterity and range of motion could potentially exceed all human modeled systems.
I assume that they shave off milliseconds by doing so, and a gyroscope (or similar) sends back the position/angle of the drone. And like this does it bypass the 'limited' onboard computer and instead uses a much better/faster computer?
Reports downthread suggest that the NN is running directly on the drone, in the form of a Jetson. Which would give much better latency and quality of video.
There's a few more details in the press release from the league itself. Sounds like they were really trying to put these things through their paces.
> The course design pushed the boundaries of perception-based autonomy—featuring wide gate spacing, irregular lighting, and minimal visual markers. The use of rolling shutter cameras further heightened the difficulty, testing each team’s ability to deliver fast, stable performance under demanding conditions
https://a2rl.io/press-release/9/artificial-intelligence-triu...
It used a small RL trained network running on the flight controllers MCU directly that controlled the motors given state (position, orientation ...) inputs. The Jetson handled vision processing.
I imagine the slower speed is a closer fit to combat drones (which have a payload and sometimes a fiber optic cable)? Also watching MultiGP they sorta move/accelerate too fast for me to fully appreciate the maneuvering.
Feels kinda similar to the innovation around manned aircraft about 100 years ago when we went from toy/observation platform to killing machine in only a couple of decades. With the ardupilot news today, it was hard to not watch this and imagine the applications to a combat environment.
> which have a payload and sometimes a fiber optic cable
The optic cable is for the human pilot. An AI piloted drone doesn't need it.
If we are ok with AI drones autonomously choosing bombing targets, then you're right.
I think Ukraine would be ok with AI drones launched next to a Russian airfield autonomously choosing targets...
I expect Russia will be ok with it in any situation.
Obviously the Russians wouldn't be one hundred percent okay with drones autonomously choosing targets in or near Russian airfields...
They'd be fine with the drones taking out all of their 3 and 5 engine bombers though.
I suspect the first big use case and subsequent rewrite of the battlefield will come from AI drones targeting enemy drones.
It's been done before, specifically in the naval context.
Although even autonomous combat/ISTAR drones may require fibre spools for BDA, ISTAR, etc.
> I imagine the slower speed is a closer fit to combat drones
A lot of comments are trying to draw connections to combat drones, but drone racing like this has been a hobby thing for a long time. The capabilities of the drones are set to have an even playing field, not to match combat drones or anything.
These aren't meant to have any parallels to combat drones, drones that fly long distances, or drones that carry payloads.
It's really just a special-purpose hobby thing for flying through a series of gates very quickly. Flight time measured in a couple minutes, no provisions for carrying weight.
We all understand that. People are simply observing that there an obvious path from this technology demonstrator to something similar in the battlefield.
> We all understand that.
I'm afraid not. RC/FPV is already a niche hobby, and media coverage is universally negative. No wonder laypeople mostly think of kamikaze drones when they see something like this.
You mean the stuff that anyone knew was possible 10 years ago, but was waiting for the tech to become much cheaper?
Yeah, now its just cheaper enough so its happening
> The spec DCL drone isn't very capable compared to the more open-specification drones in racing leagues like MultiGP
Yeah, I’m sure this is a great milestone but it isn’t notable until AI is beating MCK[1] who would be the “Lee Sodol of FPV”
[1] https://youtu.be/fmc1URVdyUs?si=jPPx5sHjU_ZDOghF
Also, this track looks nothing like a competitive drone race track, the obstacles are easier and it seems designed to cater to the autonomous drones.
It’s DCL, they’re all kind of poor like this IMO. Certainly nothing like MultiGP
> which is present on the drone and use direct IMU input and ESC commands from the Jetson
Does the jetson board even have the appropriate UARTs on it to talk directly to the ESCs? Your typical hobby grade 5" class size ESC (either 4-in-1 or discrete) cannot talk to two different controllers at the same time. If it's already wired to the four UART outputs from a 30x30 size flight controller (such as something STM32H7 based running betaflight), the ESC cannot be in communication with any other device.
Right, that was my point about the physical layout not really being conducive to NN-driven stabilization, on my cursory read.
Digging in, you could probably bitbang DShot on Orin GPIOs. It would be really sketchy since it's presumably running Linux on out-of-order cores with giant cache, so there's nothing close to realtime going on, but it's so damn fast that the theoretical problem probably doesn't matter and I bet it would work fine.
Orin also has "safety island" for ASIL applications which has lockstep Cortex-R52s. This would be ideal to run an integrated flight controller RTOS but it's supposedly fused off on consumer boards, lame. There's also a Cortex-R5 called "SPE" that could probably run a flight control RTOS as well.
Regardless of all of this theory craft, I was either totally wrong or accidentally right in two ways, depending on how you want to look at it: according to a sibling post, the STM32 board actually runs the NN-backed stabilization loop rather than a PID one! I've seen this done in research before but never in a meaningfully successful way, so I'm even more impressed now - as far as I can tell, it's _two_ novel solves, an actually working PID-or-better NN-based stabilization system on STM32 _and_ inside-out vision based flight planning for racing on the Nvidia board.
This is only a few days after the massive drone attack in Russia. Only a matter of time until we have drones smart enough to dodge bullets (or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing) while flying at breakneck speeds being controlled by AIs we don't fully understand.
The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?”
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”
It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
“Nothing.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
Vonnegut’s bleakness is not theoretical which gives it a specific bite. As POV Vonnegut cleaned up the shriveled remains of civilian victims of firebombing.
And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia. It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone battlefields.
Missed that news; https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-p...
I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare. Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one.
Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. They were the first to deploy the fiber-optic cable drones as an anti-ECM measure. And of course both sides are ordering parts from China.
Current warfare is drone Vs people.
Future warfare will be drone Vs drone, and we might see the main battlefield entirely devoid of people until one or other side runs out of drones.
$4k per drone... ouch.
A lot of money if you're a UK benefits recipient, not a lot of money for a piece of military equipment. Slightly more than the annual allowance of one asylum seeker.
Whole program is about a third of the cost of a Type 26 Frigate.
The asylum seeker comparison is interesting.
While I want to reduce the number, I can't but help think how we essentially create them in the first place by destroying the countries which create the economic conditions they flee from.
Asylum seekers are not fleeing bad economic conditions, or at least they are claiming not to. Also, we didn't create refugees from Syria or Ukraine - Syria and Russia did.
Kamikaze FPV drones starts from $400 (without warhead), from $1000 if it has 20km of optic fiber or is an interceptor. If it is not a kamikaze, like heavy bomber or reconnaissance - $10k+.
Extremely affordable!
How much does 20km of optic fibre weigh? Why don't these fibre strands suffer from the same physical limits as cabling used in suspension bridges? To be clear: I am not doubting that multi-kilometer optic fibre controlled drones do not exist. There are plenty of highly quality news sources and YouTube videos about them.
https://www.wildberries.ru/catalog/423372174/detail.aspx
Weight: 2.2 kg Price: 78 000 ₽ ($1000)
Just to clarify, this 20km fibre spool is installed on the drone itself and unwinds automatically as drone flies.
Presumably they are lying on the ground.
One Tu-22M is $100 million.
It is priceless. It's not produced anymore. You can't exchange $100 million for new Tu-22M. Not exactly priceless, you probably can replicate the production by rebuilding the factories for every component and all related production chains. But that'll be much more than $100 million.
The UK has also released some details of a new 'in bulk' RF-based drone takedown DEW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vY5efYXMQ
100k kamikaze drones are not that many for the current stage of war. Millions are consumed annually.
Future children will walk through the forests collecting drone motors to make their next school project...
[flagged]
I hope this scares nations away from warfare altogether, given the unpredictability of outcomes with heavy drone usage. Even China: they may have a lot of the little buggers, but that Ukraine attack took a lot of scheming. I doubt China can out-manufacture human and AI trickery.
I'm afraid they won't have a choice. Without Russia The West and Nato will crush China fast.
Only The West and Ukraine can stop this, the East part has no choise in that case, becase If they lose, they will cease to exist...
That future arrived years ago. Now it's targeting journalists, women and children. Ukraine is just doing it at a lower cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCfv79C_-I0
Let's review what Uncle Ted had to say about this.
See paragraph 87 by searching for "THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS"
https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/IndustrialSocietyAnd...
The conclusion is succinct and the stuff leading up to it of dubious quality.
"92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."
Obligatory link to the short film (future documentary) “Slaughterbots” (2017), which depicts exactly this in harrowing detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
This is portrayed in Ministry for the Future which describes AI controlled swarms of small drones/bombs that fly apart and come together at their target and are almost impossible to stop.
Fantastic book, highly recommended.
I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.
Interesting! I found it to be almost too optimistic or unbelievably hopeful.
Same here. I think I hadn't ever felt so hopeful for the future as I was while reading that book. I doubt that our world will turn out so positive.
It will likely come out somewhere in between our fears and our hopes. So it's good that we double down on imagining hopeful scenarios. Makes it easier to realize them.
Not so sure. Russia arranged a lot of "worst case scenarios" for all of us. It will take a lot of effort to get to "okay" again.
In current times it's very strange not to include the US in such claims...
Kim Stanley Robinson's books are all like that - a near/mid term crisis you can easily relate with, often caused by climate change, that eventually people rise up to kinda resolve, putting it on a hopeful trajectory. Lots of expressing of human best qualities along the way. Similar to the Culture in this.
>drones smart enough to dodge bullets
well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other.
>The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
>or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing
just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.
They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)
Note for example, that Ukraine attack, although it caused no civilian casualties... it relied heavily on civilian infrastructure. Ukraine rented warehouses, common trucks, and hid the drones in normal shipping containers.
Thus indeed, this made the battlefield larger instead, now common trucks, warehouses and shipping containers are legitimate targets.
What Ukraine destroyed doesn't help either, for example they destroyed early warning airplanes intended to warn Russia if incoming missiles are nuclear or not. How Russia have to assume incoming missiles are nuclear, specially if they are flying in the regions where their land nuke detectors were destroyed too (I think 1 or 2 years ago Ukraine did that).
Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence. Now common trucks and containers are a threat as big as many advanced military hardware out there. A truck with a bunch of drones can open a hole in your nuclear defense as much as stealth planes were needed for this before.
>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's morale breaking, not by literally running out of soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for), most people would prefer to save their own lives rather than die for nothing.
So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on.
That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards.
---
And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.
Well, kinda. Paraguay managed to almost wipe itself out. The war only stopped after virtually all Paraguayan men were dead.
Many factors contributed to Germany losing WWII, but one of them was because they ran out of soldiers. They were down to using boys and old men.
They 'ran out of soldiers' because they were surrendering en masse. It's difficult to know the exact numbers on anything from that era because there are ambiguities and poor record keeping abounds, but it's estimated that some 11 million Germans ended up surrendering. [1]
So yeah as morale collapses you're left expanding the age of conscription, which further collapses morale. There were plenty of sardonic jokes about the Volkssturm, 'the people's brigade.' Why is the Volkssturm the state's most valuable resource? Because they have silver in their hair, gold in their teeth, and lead in their bones.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befehlsnotstand#Nazi_Germany
> This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale.
The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two years and provide education abilities for women afterwards. But in order to actually achieve change, you have to invest significantly more resources to actually build the foundations for a viable society: democracy, rule of law and an economic perspective for the populace.
In Germany, the Allied Forces stayed for about 45 years, two generations worth of time. Just think of the massive amount of money and resources invested... the first years were taken similarly to Afghanistan - depose the Hxtler regime and rebuild a rule of law afterwards and, as in the Luftbrücke, ensure basic survival. But then, they stayed in for over three decades to make sure that a healthy democracy would not just form but also establish and entrench itself against threats, and that Germany had an industrial base which was used to provide employment and income for the populace. Also, thank God for the Americans deciding not to follow the "Morgenthau plan" that proposed turning Germany into a purely agrarian state with no industrial capability ever again - that would have caused us to follow down the Afghanistan path with utter certainty.
In Afghanistan however, the situation after the immediate war and short post-war period was markedly different. The troops were locked up in their bases outside of bombing jihadists, which meant that local warlords had little to no oversight in their atrocities and stuff like "bacha bazi" (organized child sexual abuse) and slavery went on with effective impunity. The local puppet government barely had any income sources other than foreign aid (and selling opium on the black market) which meant there was no way to form a national identity and storytelling or even a common purpose, and a lack of oversight of the occupying forces over the puppet government led to widespread corruption and looting of the external investments, which led to it losing support across the country. And on top of that, we didn't even do decent oversight over our own troops. Abu Ghuraib is far from the only scandal that was barely prosecuted, not to mention all the other shit that was quietly swept under the rug - that led to the populace despising our troops even more.
We didn't lose Afghanistan because the Taliban are a strong army - they were and are not, just look at the videos from right after the takeover. We lost Afghanistan because we didn't give anyone in the wide population a reason to fight for themselves and not just submit to the next best warlord.
A war doesn't end when a government is deposed, it ends when resistance ceases (which is generally because morale breaks). Up until, and including, the final day of US withdrawal in Afghanistan the Taliban were fiercely resisting. US troops rarely left their little green zones because they would have been killed, same as in Iraq. The media stopped meaningful coverage of the war relatively quickly, which I think led people to believe that meaningful resistance wrapped up relatively quickly, but that's not the case at all. The Taliban ended up killing at least 75,000 soldiers/security forces and wounding what was likely some large multiple of that.
All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so. Americans would never tolerate US soldiers dying by the tens to hundreds of thousands as would have happened if we actually tried to enforce order on foot. So we were left with proxy soldiers, contractors, and a money printing machine. But that simply wasn't enough to defeat the Taliban, let alone carry out the grand changes you mention.
> All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so.
I disagree with this assessment.
Had the Western forces provided actual, proven economic opportunities for the people, the supply of "resistance" fighters would have dwindled. People don't become terrorists or insurgents just because, they follow that path because they do not see a gainful alternative to this life. (Side note, we're seeing this also in Palestine where Hamas and Fatah both draw a steady supply of recruits from the desperate)
Afghanistan has untold billions of dollars worth of all kinds of natural resources [1]. But no attempt was made, not even on paper, to exploit these natural resources. IMHO, even a single pilot project would have been a good start - a mine that pays a decent amount of money to the workers and the profits going to the national government as well as local authorities. Basically, show to the wide population that something good came around from all the suffering in the end, provide an alternative from the Taliban propaganda that at least promised salvation in the afterlife for killing infidels.
But no, we ignored this opportunity, which meant that other than "women can go to schools" we did not have any talking points available to counter the Taliban propaganda of "they're killing us with impunity and the puppet government is looting". That is how we truly lost, and what China and a bunch of oil sheiks will now enjoy.
[1] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/why-is-afghanistan-par...
There is no Afghanistan . There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords. "Afghanistan" hallucinated by the us, as a state does not exist and never has.
> There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords.
Germany used to be the same until 1871, a loose federation of fiefdoms that regularly went to war amongst each other. Fun fact, the tariff region structure [1] very much resembles a map from what was "Germany" before then [2].
It's not impossible to turn a bunch of small fiefdoms into one powerful entity. All you need is a compelling story and, as I wrote in this thread, some sort of economic incentive/perspective that actually shows to the population that the new government is actually better for their individual lives than what was before.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/c18q0r/das_heilige_tari...
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Heiliges_R%C3%B6misches_...
Well congrats they got that story, they repelled in order: the mongols, the greek, the chinese, the russians, the british, the russians, the americans and soon the chinese. Are they the swiss yet ? Some ingredient is missing , the story aint it.
Up until the Soviet era, a lot of the natural resources Afghanistan has simply were not relevant, or maybe that fits it better, there were easier ways to acquire them than a country thousands of road (!) miles away from the powers that were.
The Soviets wanted Afghanistan for imperialist reasons, during the first Taliban era there were enough other sources that were more convenient, the Americans lacked the conviction and coherence to follow through... and now the Chinese are swooping in with money.
> It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way.
Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in people not voting for you come next election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places.
That's the problem. First order effect is of course good for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot more wars and battlefields in a less stable world.
And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough, and hard to "control" enough that it is available for organised crime you might see it used in assassinations, gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
> Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
I'm still concerned about the worst case scenario there being Microsoft getting their trusted computing wet dream. However I'm hopeful that it ends up being nothing more than embedded microscopic serial numbers in anything resembling a microcontroller, ID requirements to place purchases, and legal requirements for disposal (no more garage sale electronics).
The other scenario that I think might be more likely is radar and video surveillance covering every inch of every city and a related domestic agency capable of fielding rapid, tightly targeted anti-aircraft measures on a large scale.
No.
Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it.
In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service.
This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
> This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0] while mandatory military service was still in place [1]. The conscripts did not play a role in protecting democracy.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain)
There are no silver bullets. It's just that having (solely) an elite warrior class is an extra risk.
Decision-making in the armed forces is always performed by a "warrior class". The people who operate heavy war machinery are also career soldiers; conscripts are light infantry.
And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory military service. It only makes sense in the context of a small country (in terms of population) bordering a large aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly) Canada.
No, conscripts operate also tanks and artillery. They also load and prepare combat aircraft.
Artillery and tanks will have some kind of professional officer though.
Armed forces culture is also incredibly important. Goal/mission oriented organizations are harder to co-opt than top-down command structure organizations.
This is similar to the argument behind the American constitutional right to own guns.
In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the training, organisation and weaponry of the professional military will be able to beat them in contemporary circumstances.
I realise military service means people have some training, but as much as the professionals? What about air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can react.
Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?
An insurgency doesn’t report to a battlefield to be slaughtered by the professional army. To see what a large-scale American resistance would look like, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan are instructive.
The people doing the mandatory military service is the army. There is no army without the mass army.
They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily people who stay for longer than their military service.
Maybe it's unrelated to the thread topic, but the benefit of the American 2 amendment system is that the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript. Maybe this would have prevented the war with Ukraine
It did not historically stop conscription in the US though, so I do not think it would do so anywhere else.
The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces.
Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as much as anything, a way to reduce the temptation to rely on those instead of summoning a posse (for law enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary), rather than a way to prevent conscription.
They ultimately failed at that, too, though.
> not to deny the state the ability to do so
> were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted
If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds. That said I think there's plenty of evidence that your first claim is false depending on how you define the particulars of "deny the state".
> If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds.
No, the claim that the purpose of the second amendment was to assure that the state could rely on a citizen militia for internal and external security instead of denying them that ability and forcing them to rely on professional forces is not at all at odds with the claim that large professional internal and external security forces were not something that the framers trusted.
Your excerpting a verb phrases from each of the two claims to claim a conflict while ignoring the rest of the claims may suggest the source of your misreading -- because you seen to think that the thing that I said that the 2A was not meant to deny the states was the same thing the framers didn't trust, rather than something that was an alternative to it.
The excerpting was to minimize comment length, nothing more. That said I do see now where I rather catastrophically misread your earlier comment. I agree with what you wrote.
However in context it seems wrong because regardless of intent one of the effects of an armed populace is that a sufficiently unpopular conscription is going to carry serious physical risks for those in power. With regards to the framers I'd expect such a scenario to be classified as government tyranny and marked NOTABUG.
I'd suggest that the answer to the person you responded to is that the conscriptions that happened in the US weren't sufficiently unpopular to motivate such drastic measures.
> the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript
Generally such conscripts realize they're dooming their family to at best prison and at worst dying in the raid on their home.
Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing their national service, and the career soldiers (who are the people likely to start a coup)?
In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.
The career soldiers are recruited from people doing their mandatory military service, and upon this, many people having done their mandatory military service are part of the home defence and practice now and then.
I did my conscription service in 2005-2006(iirc), plus one tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan.
This is the first I hear that this would be the motivation.
The main motivation is that for a small country like Sweden to have enough manpower to defend itself adequately, conscription is necessary.
Man, with all the respect to Sweden, you're in your own [very high] class.
I feel we're behind the Swiss, and want to imitate them.
Don't we already have this in the form of the state?
About your last paragraph: High level, I generally agree, but when you dive deeper to look at the numbers, I doubt that you can have 1000 USD drones that can fly at 200 mph/320 km/h. One quarter of that speed, I could believe.
https://youtu.be/oG2GaSMlfdo
Off the shelf parts are available for 200mph quads (that’s without payload though)
quad - no. Plane type - very doable.
"And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing."
You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now, terrorists.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
I agree with your other points, but this only helps with (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.
Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.
I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie "Robot Jox".
+1 for mentioning that movie; I watched it a month ago and it's hilarious. Nearest I've seen to live action with giant robot anime sensibilities.
[dead]
All hard countered by a laser like the Iron Beam, no? Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?
Combined arms is the probable solution for a Ukraine type war. As soon as your expensive laser lights up, it's got a couple of minutes to move before artillery shells arrive.
Of course deeper into Russia that's safe .. but instead you have the problem of a huge area to cover. You can protect a few high value targets but not everywhere. Consider something like the early stages of the Iraq war: target every single civilian electrical substation and petrol station with a drone bombing.
47 second is the best artillery response I've seen in Russia Ukraine war.
Yeah, an artillery strike, a smoke screen, or fog. I'm also reading the target needs to be stationary or its movements predictable; unpredictable evasive maneuvers should be easy enough to implement (at the cost of speed/range). Plus there's the cost of the device itself, while it says it costs $3 per shot, it's still an (up to) 100 kw device + sensors + power supply setup. It doesn't say how much the system itself costs or its maintenance.
Or attack while it rains. Sure, a laser is great for defending Southern California or a place in the Middle East, but not so great for defending Great Britain
Rain probably adds a fair degree of difficulty for the drones themselves, though?
The obvious counter to a laser could be 'more drones'? And maybe just have the drones sneak up close to the ground.
I always hear this sneak up thing and think about how birds can be caught with netting. And all the barbed wire in old battlefields. I don't think drones will be able to meaningfully sneak up to a laser.
Of course more drones works. But more drones here is less drones there. It means lasers are an effective deterrent against opportunistic attacks.
Both Russia and Ukraine are putting up netting around the roads near the frontlines. Wire-guided drones are able to fly close enough to the ground to avoid it.
Sure but i would expect a laser to be at least 10x more expensive than a drone. Would you need 10 sneaky drones to overwhelm a laser?
My theory is that there will be pernicious netting around lasers, and any sneaking drones will tangle themselves up far from the laser. So only straight mass attacks will work. If you have but 10 drones you'll be unlikely to take out a laser I'd say.
The problem is the asymmetry. Drones are cheap, can be produced in huge numbers, and can be deployed anywhere by anyone. You can't put laser defences on every target, and the best laser defence could still be overwhelmed by a sufficient number of drones.
I am fucking terrified of drones.
Drones still have the limiting factor that is that they need to be produced at all as a piece of technology. Artillery shell on the other hand has all the explosive bits needed to make that drone blow up half your house, only it is a dummy round being fired from technology that has been globally solved and replicated for what over 100 years now, with huge stocks of surplus available along with popular rudimentary designs used by various guerillas around the world.
Increasingly we are also seeing a world where the technology to shape a cultures mind share can be deployed with a few dozen lines of code and a malware bot net rather than a sophisticated and well funded mass media operation a la the 1960s western cultural revolution supported in part by the CIA. You don't even need to blow up the enemies country, you can convince them it is in their best interest to be subjugated and they will remove their own naysayer internally and roll out the carpet for you when you arrive and proclaim your regional Obergruppenführer to meet production quotas.
a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3 ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph? not an easy situation.
ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second? maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.
Plus artillery shells, cruise missiles, high altitude balloons and various other ways to fill the sky with literally tons of foil, chaff, tiny bits of wire, smoke, ball bearings, blaring radio transmitters, balsa wood dummy gliders, whatever is hoped to disrupt the targeting long enough to sneak something nitrogen-rich near to the fiddly optics.
And ultimately there's the cost factor. Drones can be mass produced for cheap, laser systems are specialized and expensive. Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in development) is drone swarms, one operator directing a squad of a hundred drones like it's an RTS game. Only one grenade or kamikaze drone needs to detonate close enough to a laser system to take it out of action. Mind you, the system has a range of up to 10 kilometers, so if the drones are detected from that far out there's enough time to take them all out.
Here’s a DARPA project from a few years back that is exactly having a small number of operators for a large number of drones. Very real.
https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/offensive-swarm-enab...
It seems like the power source required for a portable laser system makes it very cumbersome. Why not just use a fleet of very low cost anti-drone drones? They can be "AI-powered" to seek out enemy drones and try to damage them or throw a net on them.
I do think we will see more and more laser systems installed on large naval vessels as an alternative to close-in weapon system (CIWS), which, in practice, has not been very effective against missile attacks.
The issue with anti-drone drones is that mid-air interception of a fast moving object by another fast moving object is an incredibly difficult problem from a physics perspectives - especially when one of those objects is actively trying to dodge. If you add in a requirement that the drone must be captured in a non-destructive way, it’s only going to be possible with the lamest consumer drones.
The way air-air missiles typically work is massive fragmentation warheads and proximity detonation. Even then, it doesn’t always work.
The pro however is that the interceptor can position itself somewhat arbitrarily, and there doesn’t need to be ongoing line of sight from the initial detection point. In some cases (theatre radar systems, standoff radar systems), they may not even need to be able to see the target drone until they’re within detonation range. (Think ‘hides behind a random bush until they’re within detonation range of the target drone as it tries to zip by, then explodes with no warning’).
Then of course the attacking drones will add randomness to their attack patterns.
Lasers have the advantage that it’s essentially impossible to dodge a laser beam (speed of light meaning that for objects within the ranges we’re talking about are lazed the moment the laser turns on), so it’s purely an aiming/detection/line of sight issue. But they have the disadvantage that if the drone gets out of the line of sight, it’s completely ineffective. So they’ll need to be placed at locations that overlook large areas and have good visibility towards the entire potential approach area, which makes them vulnerable to artillery, massed attacks, etc.
Well, at least we know what shape the new arms race is taking!
The issue with anti-drone drones is that mid-air interception of a fast moving object by another fast moving object is an incredibly difficult problem from a physics perspectives - especially when one of those objects is actively trying to dodge.
The advantage of course is that the interceptor can position itself arbitrarily, and there doesn’t need to be ongoing line of sight from the initial detection point.
Lasers have the advantage that it’s essentially impossible to dodge a laser beam (speed of light meaning that for objects within the ranges we’re talking about are lazed the moment the laser turns on), so it’s purely an aiming/detection/line of sight issue. But they have the disadvantage that if the drone gets out of the line of sight, it’s completely ineffective.
Well, at least we know what shape the new arms race is taking!
> Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in development) is drone swarms
Various entities related to the US military have been simulating and physically testing various approaches to that for years. There are blurbs in the press here and there. In some cases source code even got published (not clear if that was intentional though).
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/dr...
yeesh. i made this comparison once and HN told me that campy action movies are bad to base policy on :\
Some of this stuff is getting to the point where we will seriously need to have a global talk on whether we should put a pin in this tech or not
The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make.
We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.
The cat is definitely out of the bag.
A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example.
Nice.
Yes, and so far it's much easier to drive a van into a crowd of people. Nobody has tried to mandate tech in cars that detects and prevents such malicious behavior.
Vehicles are registered and licensed to tie them to specific owners. You are required to provide a identification/drivers license when renting a vehicle. The largest, most dangerous vehicles like semi-trucks have additional restrictions on licensing and access. There is a pretty robust system in place to reduce unattributable crimes using vehicles.
Can you drive a van into a group of people without even being physically present though ?
Yes. https://www.psu.edu/news/campus-life/story/hackers-who-remot...
Even without vulnerabilities like that, something like https://comma.ai/openpilot could very likely be used in the same way ArduPilot was used in the recent Ukrainian drone attacks.
The RAF guys tried this back in 1967 to attack the Iranian Shah...
easier than a drone, technically. using the same tools and techniques too.
a van is just a bigger, more inherently stable drone.
> Can you drive a van into a group of people without even being physically present though ?
It's probably totally doable by now. We literally have self-driving cars.
> A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example.
America insists on making sure that guns are universally available so that school shootings can still happen. Doesn't register. The death toll seems to be politically acceptable.
Generally, if you are smart enough to fashion this without being caught, you are too smart to do something like that.
Plus, you got a cool and potentially lucrative hobby, designing exterminator machines. Why bother with children at that point?
There are much, much better targets to be had.
Your point on the dwindling barrier to implementation stands.
"Most people don't want to murder innocents" isn't reassuring. It only takes one lunatic. And there's a lot of lunatics out there.
Then the proper solution is to create fewer lunatics: provide better mental health support, good social safety nets, and a more egalitarian society.
Well yes, but that's a utopian idea that can never be fully realised. You can't fix them all. There'll always be some number of crazy, broken, malevolent psychos out there. If you don't think this is true then you need to meet more people.
We need to minimise the damage they can cause, and that means preventing them from using slaughterbots.
> Why bother with children at that point?
the premise is that the person doing it is very mentally ill. the question, "why would they do that when they could do something else that makes more sense?", doesn't make a lot of sense itself under the premise.
If a person is very ill mentally then there are already many ways to kill people in numbers, some of which ways are much more accessible than slaughterbots.
It's the barrier to implementation that I find concerning and the lack of defensive innovation just as much of a concern.
I mean... yeah, that’s a definite possibility. If a lunatic has access to explosives, there’s an infinite number of ways they could do that.
The hard part is that there is no effective way to regulate anything in the supply chain involved except for the explosives themselves. Everything else is super commoditized at this point and, other than the props, very multi-purpose. The first significant hexcopter I built used a BeagleBone Blue for processing, generic ESCs and BLDCs for the motors, and an aluminum frame that I cut out of aluminum tubes from Home Depot. Max takeoff weight was 55lb, because that’s the heaviest it could legally take off with. This was 7 years ago.
If one is a lunatic, there are easy to find recipes for making bulk (albeit dangerous to be around) explosives.
one thing in societies favor though - sufficiently unstable lunatics tend to self delete themselves in various ways by being unstable lunatics. few tend to be in the “sweet” spot of dangerous lunatics who are stable and focused enough to follow through successfully with a dangerous plan. thankfully.
For example - most people who could synthesize multi-kilo quantities of TATP without blowing themselves up and successfully build a DIY drone to carry it have better and more productive things to do with their lives. at least in the west.
That’s why only the strong communities with strong families will survive, because even lunatics are cared for in strong community structures.
I'm sure that everyone would agree on that, and that $bad_actor wouldn't take advantage of the fact that everyone else had agreed to lay down their arms. Game theory sucks, but it's hard to get around.
I guess it falls on me to break it to you then but serious "global talks" happen at the exploding end of ordinance.
There is no Jedi Council to appeal to, no wise group of non-aggressive nations gathering to pacify the troublemakers.
why? if nuclear weapons got the green light, do you expect a different outcome?
Weapon that threatens everyone is better than weapon that threatens only some
Because nuclear weapons got the green light.
As if the billionaires won't simply go "F that noise, more money for me!!!" Ethical concerns are way down the priority list for most AI focused companies.
There wouldn't be any pin in it. Drones - automated weapons in the wide sense - will be the new MAD/equalizer weapon accessible to smaller countries who have no chances of getting into the nuclear club. Without such a weapon in the coming new world order - marked specifically by the USA's withdrawal from enforcing international law - they will be an easy prey to the bigger countries. Ukraine is just a preview of that equalizing power.
They don’t need to dodge bullets. Just make them small, cheap, fast, and powerful enough to fly to a target and punch a single bullet perfectly through their skull in an instant. Launch a swarm for redundancy. And because they are autonomous, these drones can be entirely unaffected by radio signals once deployed.
Politicians will never go outside again. The only defense is to be loved by all and have no enemies. Or, the more likely scenario: disguises and full anonymity.
No, only our rulers will be anonymous.
We'll simply never know who we're being ruled by.
OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.
There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones.
A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target.
Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.
You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563
Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it is still a hit.
These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier to get than it used to be but they are still in wide use.
Your link literally says:
> Технологія нова, потребує вдосконалення і масштабування.
> Eng: "The technology is new and will need improvement and scaling"
I don't understand what you're trying to prove. They do exist and I never said they don't. They keep popping up here and there, mainly working in demo conditions against static contrast targets.
My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption. Maybe some, but there's some of everything in this war. All the main uav units that I'm aware of use manually controlled fpvs and there are reasons for that.
> These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier
Oh gosh.
> My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption.
Make that point, then! Nothing in your original comment suggested this, just hostile dismissal.
Now that you’ve written a more substantive comment I think we actually agree overall. Most operations in the Ukraine-Russia war are manual piloting. Autonomy is over-hyped overall so far. However! A large number of autonomous systems have still been deployed and interest in autonomy is only growing. Both things can be true at the same time.
> Oh gosh.
Come on, read the whole sentence please. Lock on targeting modules are absolutely being superseded by fiber optic as it becomes “easier” to acquire than it used to be.
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev... was posted by a sibling commenter and is a fairly accurate summary to my knowledge, including a substantiation of the notion that depending on how you look at it, lock on modules were a stop-gap before fiber became available or fiber is a stop-gap before good autonomy becomes widespread.
"OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations."
That's what I literally said, what part if it you did not understand?
Do some research, on FO drones too and just stop embarrass yourself.
Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment.
Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here.
Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.
As if the US can compete with china on drone numbers or quality. If drones are the future of war, China will have an enormous advantage in a future war. Let's hope it never comes to that.
Agree 100%, it's a funny strategy but also shows how weak the US hand is - China can pump out extraordinary numbers of these things, and they have pretty incredible tech talent. I wish I didn't live in such interesting times.
What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece.
But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!"
Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
"when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity.
Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations.
But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.
So I think we’re on the same page when it comes to the layperson’s ignorance on the subject, and I agree the term is mostly useless. I also agree that quadcopters aren’t the endgame of future warfare, although I’ve been entirely shocked at how effective they’ve been so far.
I don’t really put much stock in your average person’s take on warfare generally, so I’m not too bothered by the torrent of misunderstanding. You see the same thing with AI/AGI, and much of it is fueled by those garnering for clicks.
I will say I missed in my original response that the OP was taking exclusively about autonomous devices, and in that case I would agree with their take.
Dude, it's not a prediction, it's what is currently happening. If you follow active drone units (from both sides) you'll see that they're all controlled by operators until the last frame.
These bombers attacks were done with manual control too. These drones had LTE modems and on footage it's clearly visible that they controlled by operator.
People can't read these days, especially if it doesn't match the reality they build in their heads.
Oh I see - emphasis on the 'autonomous' part, yeah I would agree on that for today. Things are pretty immature on the autonomous side right now, but that will definitely change ... it's still the military, so it'll take a while, but they'll do it when they're forced to.
I'll skip the shitty retort about not reading.
An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1].
"Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology."
[1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...
Are you sure?
One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems.
Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
If you can get a GPS fix (or a lat long to start), you can run an INS just as easily.
Most of the conversation here is focused on cheap drones. Are there cheap Inertial Navigation Systems (INS)? As I understand, it only appears inside of multi-million dollar cruise/ballistic missiles, fighter jets, and long-range bombers. Please correct me if I am wrong. Also, it might be that there are cheap INS systems that are good enough (e.g., "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"), plus a bit of AI-enabled vision on the drone camera.
Yes, you can buy an IMU as a single IC for less than $5[1]. Otherwise your smartphone probably already have all the required sensors.
Of course, those have significantly less performance than the one you put in an airliner or ballistic missile.
As you mention yourself, its a question of good enough. You need to be a lot more accuracy to hit a city after a twenty minute sub-orbital coast, than to find the nearby trench. And yes, computer vision is used to correct for drift.
[1]: IMU's on DigiKey: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/motion-sensors/im...
Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.
> Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed
Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
> there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones
As long as you define ‘drone’ as a tiny quadrotor. Missiles like Sidewinder and Hellfire, cruise missiles like Tomahwak, fire-and-forget MANPADs, GPS-guided gravity bombs, even ICBMs with MIRV warheads. All autonomously travel to their target and destroy it.
There are even some loitering anti-tank missiles that climb up above the launching aircraft and sit on a parachute for a while until they see a tank to destroy. The pilot never has to see the tank.
All autonomous and adopted.
The main novelty in the electric drone tech is very very low cost.
> The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.
Why is this, for the rest of us?
To imitate.
There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.
If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...
Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.
The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones.
Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.
There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.
Please read before responding.
I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.
As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!
The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad
[dead]
-That you know of.
Technical University Delft. Not a word about ethics of developing these AI technologies. Happy techbros making happy gadgets.
FPVs are the most distinctive element in Russian-Ukrainian war, changing many traditional war dogmas. So far AI in this war wasn't heavily used, FPVs are controlled by humans at both sides. I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but it'll be utilised by military operations to kill more people, to conduct terror acts, controlled from afar. It allows weak players to have more leverage which is not always a good thing, and certainly disrupts power balance. Think about Al-Qaeda bringing a truck of explosive drones to Washington DC and unleashing them at White House, all autonomous, with cameras guiding the way.
I don't know, this drone race is to combat drones what F1 racing is to self driving cars. In order to win in these races, you just need to precisely control speed around well-defined turns and stuff. You don't need to adapt to a new environment. It's not surprising to me that a computer program would win in such a controlled environment.
> It allows weak players to have more leverage
I think it depends on the dominant type of defensive counter-technology used. If it's something with high capital costs like a laser or a microwave, then it will centralize combat because the USA could invest in the infrastructure needed to defeat terrorists, but not the reverse. On the other hand, if you can effectively destroy these things with birdshot, then it may not be a problem for humanity at large. I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone.
For example look at the iron dome: it is effective defense measure but very difficult to scale up to counter ICBMs.
>I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone.
The cost of a FPV quadcopter is pennies on the dollar cost of a defense system. You can 3D print a dozen frames in hours with a decent printer. Its just bolt on the parts and do a quick function test with a script or controller and its ready for action.
What point are you trying to make. Because the iron dome is hideously expensive. It costs so much more then the missiles it intercepts that it's worth it for terrorists to fire on israel purely to waste their money.
The iranian icbms from Yemen gets shot down by other systems. I don't think they are scaled up versions of the iron dome. What's interesting is the lack of confidence israel has in predicting their trajectory. They usually send up multiple interceptors for a single missile and put sirens on for half the country.
The only really economical counter i've heard of is lasers but it doesn't look like they are coming any time soon.
I've got no idea what method Israel uses to counter drones, but they certainly have struggled with them.
My absolute nightmare scenario is Iran via its proxies unleashing swarms of autonomous kamikaze drones in population centres.
Aren't lasers here already? There were pictures of Israel using them.
You're right i didn't know that. They are using lasers to fry drones, but not yet against missiles, even though the iron beam was announced 10 years ago. It sounds like the system is still being developed/rolled out. It will be great when it works because finally Israel will have an interceptor that's cheaper then the target.
> I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but ...
It unfortunately goes even deeper than that. The Quadcopter FPV community is watching their open source software actively be picked up for warfare, and can often tell what version they were running when watching released Russian & Ukrainian footage later.
Every beneficial step we make in the maker community will be used to expedite death in conflict. A few 3D printers and a digikey order are all you really need to seed an insurgent movement at this point.
Oh man, can anyone imagine a non-Terminator scenario for this?
Update: I'm not saying people shouldn't develop this, we're never going to squash human curiosity. But when I see this kind of stuff, I'm deeply troubled by how bad actors (state and non-state) will use this.
I hope our security services are working hard on countering these potential threats.
Im more worried about these type of things causing us to blast each other and ourselves back to the 1920s or so during conflicts when small explosive EMPs start being viewed as less damaging than drones and robots. A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast. The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage, but if drone bombs represent even more damage they become viable. Yeah it will destroy all the radios around and fuck up a bunch of expensive equipment, but you would still have soldiers with guns rather than just smoking craters.
> A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast.
I'm having a hard time believing this is effective.
> The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage
Russians don't care about collateral damage and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of them using such weapons?
Nobody really uses much undirected EM warfare in my opinion because it represents a huge escalation in a war, similar to the use of indiscriminate chemical weapons, or even nuclear weapons.
It would be devastating in the local battlefield, potentially frying radio or other equipment depending on the size of the device or how close you could lob it towards the enemy before going off; but with the low wattages many non-military communication devices use today you would also be blasting horrible noise to all of them beyond the local area and disrupting communications across potentially multiple neutral countries.
It would be a large act of aggression against any countries around them and NATO, and at scale possibly even piss off far away countries like the US and China. Especially large EMP devices could even be temporarily misidentified as a nuclear explosion and gain the immediate full attention by any nuclear powers watching out for it.
I think you're wildly over stating the effective range of EMP. This isn't Goldeneye.
You could do EMP, but you could also do some sort of point-defense turret. Drones are lightweight and fragile, so it doesn't need to be big - just fast and auto-targeting.
Didn't they try this in Ukraine and it doesn't work? Any point installation is quickly overwhelmed. The only answer to FPV drones so far seems to be more FPV drones. Though they're not using fully-autonomous drones in Ukraine yet, so that might still play out.
“[As of May 2025] Ukraine has developed and successfully tested the Sky Sentinel – an AI-powered, fully automated turret designed to shoot down Russian drones and missiles… the M2 is known to have an effective range of 1.5 kilometers against airborne threats. Each unit costs approximately $150,000. Developers estimate that protecting a city would require 10 to 30 turrets… Given that each Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone used by Russia costs around $100,000, Sky Sentinel offers a scalable and cost-effective solution to a persistent and deadly threat.”
https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/53546
This doesn’t address “Quickly overwhelmed”.
Yes, a wall of $150,000 bushmasters with some servos can take hurl enough lead in the air to protect a city from a single gulf-war era $100,000 lawnmower engine on two meter wings bumbling in a straight line at jogging pace.
We’re currently in the “a shipping container on a semi can could launch dozens of $2000 racing quads with molotov cocktails zip-tied to the bottom with enough agility to thread a needle faster than a turret can swing its own mass”
And the writing is on the wall for some near-future “any nation state could drop sci-fi cluster bombs that shed ten-thousand 250gram racing quads that can overwhelm even the most advanced point defence just by numbers and it’ll be cheaper than a conventional 2000lb bomb”
>with enough agility to thread a needle faster than a turret can swing its own mass
If it has a range of 1.5km, then the drone needs to be moving really fast in order to move a couple of degrees per second.
If it's going like 80mph, then that's 36m/s, which comes out to <1.4 degrees/s at 1500m away. For 1000m, you get ~2 degrees/s. Not to mention that this velocity is at a right angle to the turret, and you have to close the distance.
I feel like search and rescue after an earthquake where a drone swarm can canvas and categorize if it saw movement or not is one possible "non-bad" use.
Fire departments and police in Germany are deploying more and more drone units, too.
Firefighters use them to search for missing persons but also to get aerial images and a better overview of larger scenes as "running around" is often not possible or doesn't help that much with the overview.
Police is using them to take pictures of accidents. It's easier to see tire marks and the whole "history" of an accident from above. Really reduces their time on a scenery to take pictures of everything.
very prompt burrito delivery?
If by burrito you mean shaped charge high explosives with lethal shrapnel, triggered by facial recognition, delivered by drones the size of house sparrows at the speed of sound, then yes, burrito delivery.
Christ, you sound like my nutritionist.
Go, Forth and multiply matrices.
In china probably very soon. In the US? Regulation has already killed that.
Paul Christiano has thought about these scenarios. I recommend his interview with Dwarkesh a while ago where he goes in depth about it.
This will definitely be used in drone vs drone dogfight. Interceptors hunting spy, bombers, and kamikaze drones.
Sure, just strap a nuke to it and watch WWIII kick off. No terminator necessary.
Drones flying through your windows to deliver things faster.
Cons: massive invasion of privacy and probably illegal.
Pros: looks cool.
I've always thought a user-installable drone-pad in the style of a window AC unit would be the ideal.
Inspecting utilities and other industrial infrastructure.
The actual race is also worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
The speed and flawlessness is quite impressive considering it is being resolved with what I imagine is noisy inertial data and a motion blurred CCD camera.
Looks like most of the comments here are about the use as weapons and the possible dangers. I believe "Slaughterbots" is the canonical sci-fi video on the subject, and it appears to be aging pretty well. Unfortunately…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
The sci-fi novel I wrote sacrifices commercial art considerations to portray the future of war more realistically. All the robots are one-shot, one-kill and all action takes place faster than human reaction time. The most humans do is approve battle plans. This is already the case largely in the Ukraine/Russia war, and now we're seeing that human FPV operators will soon be obsolete. Realistic sci-fi movies are going to be not have much action in the future. Things will have to be about careful political maneuvering, like in totalitarian country politics. You can't win against robots unless you are using other robots.
I remember being blown away by a TED talk were "minimum snap trajectories" are planned for quadcopters to fly through hoops and slots.
It's really cool to see this happening fully autonomously and at such high speed. I wonder if the use of AI means that the approach is fundamentally different, or if it uses the same principle of minimizing snap?
https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_co...
It's fundamentally different, it's using an RL trained network that gets the drone state (position, orientation, velocity) as input and directly outputs motor commands.
Interestingly, the URL for the embedded youtube video ends with the word "FATE"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
Gives me the idea for a silly game: finding YouTube videos with words in their identifiers that are relevant to the content.
Nearly two years from comparable to human to beat the best.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/30/1196777528/an-ai-quadcopter-h...
Looks like it had NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB. No GPS, Lidar, motion capture so its vision only. 6s battery so 5 incher?
Does anyone know the FC or AIO they are flying?
I’ve seen AI beat humans in simulations before, but doing it on a real track with the same hardware is honestly kind of amazing. What surprised me the most is they didn’t use any traditional flight controller. They just let the neural network handle the flying.
I’m really curious how this would perform in messier, less controlled environments.
A side note, will we still attend and watch Formula 1 races it AI would drive cars (maybe near perfection) ?
Human sports remain interesting when the humans are notably worse at whatever they do than a machine purpose built for it, or indeed wildlife that specialised for this.
Usain Bolt was the fastest human sprinter in the world, but compared to a good motorcycle over paved road he's obviously not very fast, and likewise compared to an emu. Nevertheless, Bolt's 100m performance drew big crowds, even though people also watch Motorcycle racing and (I think?) Emu racing.
It's like speed running, the categories are arbitrary and self-selecting. Why the Modern Pentathlon? Why not. Why Super Mario Warpless? Why not. If everybody wanted to do Super Mario, only the odd numbered levels and also you must kill all the enemies, that's what the run is, our choices are arbitrary and we value whatever we like.
Yes. People thought computers would kill chess, but despite current chess engines being able to trounce every human in existence, chess is more popular than ever.
That said “regular” chess is deeply in crisis, with less computer-assisted formats coming up to challenge it.
similar to drag racing i guess.
This makes me wonder what the "best" vehicle for human racing would be like, if there was no requirement for a human driver.
Let's say your task is to move a human from A to B (by a pre-designated route) as fast as possible. The only conditions are vehicle weight, no outside radio contact and no damaging the road (assume each vehicle goes separately, so e.g. slip stream effects don't matter). You can rely on the human to drive or use AI, you can go on the ground or fly through the air, anything is allowed. What would be the best way to do this?
>> The only conditions are vehicle weight, no outside radio contact and no damaging the road
Desiccate the human and compact him into an aerodynamic shape. Carry the (now much lighter and more aerodynamic) human inside a small rocket.
Well .. it depends on other assumptions, like the amount and type of energy allowed (continuous gigawatt electricity access during the trip ?), amount of "roughness" the human can sustain during the trip (canonball a human packed in an big airbag ?), actual budget limit for the project, etc ....
Not exactly what you're after, but similar: https://what-if.xkcd.com/116/
Let's not forget that this works solely for this particular racing setup. If you change a single gate, the AI they are using would not be able to adapt. Still fascinating, though.
Famous last words :)
I have been involved in research focused on ML control for some time, and believe me, I would love to see an AI model capable of controlling arbitrary systems at different operating points or in different environments. However, it is simply not feasible yet. This AI drone is no different, especially because reinforcement learning was used to train the model, which is generally not practical for real-world systems due to disturbance variables and the continuous need for adaptability.
ELI5? so, presumably if you put this thing in front of any starting gate it can navigate any course of similar gates?
or was it overfitted to this specific course?
They had no prior knowledge of the course.
I don't think so. The article says the race track was controlled by the race organisers but not that it wasn't known to the participants before the race.
Anyway given the state of the art, flying autonomously at great speeds and beating human champions without pre-training, i.e. on an unknown race track, would be a much bigger breakthrough than just beating some human champions (which has already happened except in a less official environment). You can rest assured that if that was what the team achieved, the article would be telling us all about it.
Shoot, you're totally right. They had no prior knowledge before the event, but I don't know how they teach it the course. There's more than one gate visible at a time, so they must do something to fine-tune it.
That being said, I'm sure they have a base model too, so I'm right back to wondering about the parent question: would it work if you set it down in front of a few fresh gates?
Probably not. RL is really bad at generalising to unseen environments. There was a paper about an ... otter?
Why Generalization in RL is Difficult: Epistemic POMDPs and Implicit Partial Observability
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06277
OK, it's a robotic zookeeper looking for the otter cage.
Where does it say they had no prior knowledge before the event? I can't find that in the text. Is it in the video?
I guess there's no paper yet.
> Where does it say they had no prior knowledge before the event? I can't find that in the text. Is it in the video?
Reading back through it, I'm synthesizing this statement. It's never said explicitly, and I could very well be wrong.
I'm combining the knowledge that the novel development here is that the event supervisors control the track with the fact they're showing off a training run in their video.[0] The video also links a few papers from the teams past that have some additional clues.[1][2]
> The reason for this mostly lies in the real-world aspects of the competitions. They take place in environments previously unknown by the teams, with no opportunity for benign, solution-specific changes, and little time for adapting the developed solution to the environment in situ. Moreover, competitions often pose a more challenging environment, with gates located slightly differently than on the precommunicated maps or even moving during the race, unforeseen lighting effects optimized for spectators rather than for drones, and large crowds of moving people around the flight arena.
This makes it sound like they're at least given the layout.
Note this was from a different competition (Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing by Lockheed, with DRL) back in 2019. The other paper is from 2024, but I don't have access.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10876009
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10611665
Similar tech from 2023: https://youtu.be/HGULBBAo5lA?si=D5uCJYAPD9iHA-p7
It looks like the reason it won is due to a human pilot crashing into the obstacle. Not exactly an unfair problem, but worth mentioning that it was close until human mistakes were made.
Bright futures for these engineers in the defense industry.
bright futures in the darkest places.
Tell that to the Ukrainians who fight the brutal war Russia are waging:
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-commanders-exclu...
The same cannot be said about whoever runs the site.
A few questions / thoughts:
1. I didn't see it stated explicitly, but I presume the neural net is on the far end of a radio link somewhere, not running on hardware physically mounted on the drone?
2. After viewing the FPV video on the linked page: how the hell do human pilots even come close to this pace? Insane (even assuming that the video they're seeing is higher quality than what's shown on YouTube – is it?)
3. The control software has access to an IMU. This seems to represent some degree of unfair advantage? I presume the human pilots don't have that – unless the IMU data is somehow overlaid onto their FPV view (but even then, I can't imagine how much practice would be needed to learn to make use of that in realtime).
1) No, this is interesting specifically because it was all onboard, the drone has Jetson Orin NX on it.
2) No, the video the pilot sees is usually quite bad. Racing pilots usually use either HDZero (mid resolution video with weird pixel artifacts sometimes) or analog video (looks like a broken 1980s VCR). It’s amazing what they can fly through. These DCP spec drones are also slow by racing standards. Look up MultiGP racing, it’s even faster.
3) It can be overlaid but it’s useless. The human pilot is using the control sticks as the input to an outer rate regulation loop which contains the gyro as input to an inner stabilization loop though, so the IMU is still in the mix for human control.
1. It's entirely onboard.
2. The video they're seeing is worse. Spectators typically see the frames saved directly from the camera, but the pilot will be seeing them compressed and beamed over the air to their headset. See vid.
3. The human pilots do actually have access to it. Not directly, but the flight controller translates their inputs and makes use of the IMU to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE
I’m reminded of when the US military figured out it should just replace all its proprietary field drone controllers with Xbox controllers because every single grunt that enlisted already had 10,000 hours on the things. If the future of warfare is drones, Christ, that video is terrifying.
Funny you should say that. Gamepads are not quite what you want for drone piloting for three main reasons:
1. Less precise. Gimble size matters.
2. All inputs sprung. This is exactly what you want for your three rotational axis, but you absolutely do not want your throttle resetting to 50% when you lay off. You can fix this using 3D mode where the zero setting is in the middle, but then you lose even more precision.
3. Circular inputs. This means at low or high throttle you have less roll available.
The main reason you'd want a gamepad is the size and shape. They do make gamepad-style radios, like the Radiomaster Pocket, which combine the best of both worlds.
You can pick up a simulator for $10-20 if anyone wants to give it a whirl, and many are even on Steam, but the general recommendation is to pick up a dedicated radio as soon as possible.
Note that this mainly applies to FPV quadcopters, due to how sensitive and twitchy they can be. When it comes to controlling pretty much anything else (I'd argue even most planes) these advantages are no longer relevant.
The US military is not limited to using stock COTS hardware. They have imitated the form factor and general feel of those controls, but custom built and ruggedized.
https://www.wired.com/story/fmcu-us-military-controller/
I highly recommend Macross Plus for further research this topic: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2330912/
This technological breakthrough is truly amazing, especially the fact that the drone can fly on an actual race track independently, without relying on human control. It's really cool. But honestly, as AI gets better at doing what we can do, even better in some cases, it makes me a little uneasy. Will there come a day when we truly become redundant, with AI taking over the work?
> Flying drones faster will be important for many economic and societal applications, ranging from delivering blood samples and defibrillators in time to finding people in natural disaster scenarios
Ah yes. No mention of the real big use case
This feels like a bigger deal than what Carmack is doing with an Atari controller robot.
So the drones in the Slaughterbots short film were depicted to be way too slow.
The drone has a camera and a IMU while the human has only the camera. How big is the advantage there?
Humans have a flight controller in the loop, which makes use of the IMU. I doubt we'd be able to make much use of it.
Meanwhile, many defense companies are quietly watching this racing achievement far far away through their palantíri orb researching who built that autonomous drone.
So is the processing happening on the drone? Presumably not...
Entirely, as is sensing.
Have the team published based on this work yet?
No, but there's a previous paper for the controller used: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21586
> This is more than just a racing win. The smart lightweight AI that powered the drone could help all kinds of future robots, making them faster, more efficient, and better at...
...killing you, their target.
...why are we training skynet again?
because there is money in it ?
Even R2D2 doesn't pilot the X-wing itself.
https://archive.is/wip/H3AAn
Since I can't access.
Quite cool but this is the beginning of the end I’m afraid
"Coming to a battlefield near you soon."
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
I man at this point, given what we know I'm sure someone smart can connect some dots and describe what's inevitable with 99% confidence just in the next year or two in terms of society right?
10 years.. But yeah. Just wait until these things can move through space with physical/gyro sensors on their own, at affordable costs. When orin nano super is the cost of an Esp32 (and the size of).
No gps, no fiber, no 5g, no jamming except microwaves. A python file and a target.
Scary times ahead.
This is that. This race used only a single forward-facing camera and IMU fed to an onboard Orin NX.
>>Just wait until these things can move through space with physical/gyro sensors on their own,
and better guidance software. Yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement
"Traditional waypoint navigation assumes movement through a series of Cartesian positions. But in pursuit dynamics, for example, what matters is directional alignment over time"
https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep/blob/main/docs/01-ratio...
What do you mean just wait until? The entire point of TFA is that AI is controlling the motors directly and not using some human input device. So I guess it's just wait until you actually read TFA and watch the embedded video?
The only question is whether motors or propellers will be banned for private sale first. (After drones themselves, of course.)
Why? Just request a Waymo, and then put your suitcase nuke in the backseat and watch it be delivered by AI. There's all sorts of ways to kill with AI without needing drones
Ironically the hard part of that is still more "suitcase nuke" than "last mile delivery".
I'm mildly suprised that the US hasn't seen a breakout of car bombs since Oklahoma City or WTC. It seems that the tradition force of using guns for the frequent mass casualty suicide terrorism events is too strong.
Guns are easy to get, they’re portable, they’re easy to use, and they are stable and safe to operate. Bombs are pretty much none of those things. Bombs are not sold at your local Walmart or sporting goods store, they don have weekend bomb shows at your local convention centers, they require some skill to make, the raw ingredients are tracked at point of sale, and to have the same casualty count tends to require a large amount. It doesn’t take much reasoning to understand why guns are the goto choice
Waymo is not anonymous
goodgooglymoogly, some people just are not creative thinkers at all. you think someone with the ability of creating a suitcase nuke isn't going to have the means to have a fake identity specifically for this purpose? or just steal someone else's? or being willing to make that sacrifice so being anonymous isn't a requirement?
Drones seem a lot easier and more flexible than all that. And you could operate them at scale. I’m not particularly concerned about weapons in the hands of an isolated criminal. That already exists everywhere. I’m concerned about sophisticated organizations
Yeah I man with each day the chance of a shocking event increases to 100% with predictable outcomes. But yeah thats what I'm thinking of .. there has to be a finite number of dimensions for this and related technologies in terms of use and impact (legal, economics, PR, military, political etc), some are fuzzier than others but some should be pretty clear for some analyst to share..
I kind of prefer this, even without bombs i dont want unregulated idiots dropping a drone on my head in an urban space.
That's OK. There's probably something you like that I'd like to ban, too.
My first worry wouldn't be this.
I got out of doing drone work because of all the FAA restrictions on where you can fly drones now. Within 30 miles of a major metro area? Nope. Within 20 miles of an airport? Nope. I'm exaggerating of course, but it got to a point where I was having real problems trying to find areas where you can fly a drone just for fun so I just gave up and quit.
My more immediate fear would be how the gov can control who and where these drones will be able to fly. If some revolutionary built a swarm of drones, it would be pretty easy (I would think) for the gov to just jam the signal and shut them down.
The parts? I'm not worried about. Its the gov holding the keys to access that makes me more worried.
Jam what signal? You'd need a HERF gun to stop an autonomous drone -- a real one, not something made from recycled microwave oven parts -- and an EMP bomb of some sort to stop a swarm of them.
Uh, jamming has been used since the beginning of the Russian/Ukrainian war. Its literally one of the main areas that has become a game of cat and mouse on both sides.
The Black Eye is a suitcase-sized radio noisemaker that can muddle the signals that control all but the best fiber-optic drones. According to an electronic warfare expert who writes under the pseudonym “Roy,” Black Eye can ground surveillance and attack drones from as far as 4 kilometers away, “when located high enough.”
Unlike many other jammers, which target the drone, the Black Eye targets the drone’s operator—blocking a drone’s command signal at its source. The new jammer “is appearing across the whole front,” Roy wrote. “This is a serious development for Ukraine.”
https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/05/06/blackeyejammers/
More recently:
Kvertus’ innovative EW backpack system provides Ukrainian troops with a mobile counter-drone shield for just $7,000. Operating in the 720-1050 MHz range, it jams and disables threatening Russian drones.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/05/17/the-ew-backpack-revol...
I think you're missing the whole 'autonomous' thing here.
There is no signal, and there is no operator.
The US govt has been working on countering autonomous drones for years now.
The Department is mitigating the potential negative effects of unmanned systems on U.S. forces, assets, and installations – at home and abroad. A critical portion of our efforts, particularly in the near-term, comes from improving our defenses, with an emphasis on detection as well as active and passive defenses
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/05/2003599149/-1/-1/0/FAC...
Its been working on countering drones (unmanned systems) for years; most of the drone threat it has been focused on is not autonomous but remotely-controlled. But there is considerable overlap in countermeasures (other than ones that target the control channel of remotely controlled drones.)
What countermeasures exist against a swarm of autonomous drones, other than an EMP weapon?
(Other than CIWS, because nothing like that can be used on land.)