[HN Gopher] Autonomous drone navigates independently through the...
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Autonomous drone navigates independently through the forest at 40
km/h
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 391 points
Date : 2021-10-07 21:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.media.uzh.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.media.uzh.ch)
| pcmaffey wrote:
| Imagine all the wild game we could hunt with this. No one will
| ever have to go hungry again!
| jmnicolas wrote:
| Until there's no more wild game. Countries that don't regulate
| hunting have no game left in their woods.
| woah wrote:
| Why is this possible and self driving cars aren't?
| trhway wrote:
| the drones are doing 3D from stereo. My understanding those
| autonomous cars we see around SV don't do it (except for some
| Ford sedans - probably Ford venture - who have what looks like
| stereo for the front view). Google and some others build 3D
| from lidar - it is almost as good as stereo though much less
| resolution. The low lidar resolution is close to being good
| enough for the street driving while it wouldn't work for the
| forest at meaningful speeds (even if somebody managed to place
| a lidar on drone)
| sreekotay wrote:
| (Essentially) static environment?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Because they are also cherry-picking the best results for their
| demo video, just like everyone else.
|
| Also, the cost of mistake is vastly different. Drone crashing
| into a tree? $1000 mistake. Car crashing into a group of
| schoolchildren?
| chuckee wrote:
| Priceless.
| spurgu wrote:
| Invaluable.
| xwdv wrote:
| Tuesday.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Almost static scene. Drones are also not trying to avoid each
| others, I'd be curious to see them trying to fly as a dense
| flock in the forest, or at human height in a crowd.
| modeless wrote:
| Lower stakes.
| maverwa wrote:
| These drones need to be able to do one thing: - do not hit the
| tree (or ground)
|
| And the things not to not hit are basically static. Year, Wind
| might move parts of them here and there, but you can just try
| to make sure to avoid them far enough. And we do not see if
| they can do event that.
|
| Self driving cars on the other hand... - avoid static objects
| (like trees, or houses) - stay in lane - detect and act on
| traffic signs and lights - detect other moving object and
| predict where they will be in the near future - watch for
| suddenly appearing lifeforms all around you, do not hit them! -
| if you leave your lane, do so orderly - do all that at speeds
| far over 40km/h
|
| I think the "static objects" parts is not the hardest part on
| that list.RADAR/LIDAR are good at that. I imagine the
| "everything and everyone is moving in random directions" part
| makes things harder.
| samizdis wrote:
| Maybe this approach will help, as suggested in the article:
|
| _The applications are not limited to quadrotors. The
| researchers explain that the same approach could be useful for
| improving the performance of autonomous cars ..._
| vidarh wrote:
| Trees don't suddenly run out in front of drones or make
| unexpected high speed turns.
| cletus wrote:
| People get overconfident with self-driving cars because they
| consider the problem as navigating from A to B while driving
| along the road within the law. That's the easy par The hard
| part is the long tail of human behaviour and the unexpected you
| have to deal with.
|
| Just consider an object on the road. Is it roadkill? Trash?
| Will it get out of the way? Is it a person under a blanket? In
| some places it may well be a person to get you to stop so they
| can rob you or worse.
|
| It's said that humans are motivated by fear and greed when it
| comes down to it. Let's talk about fear.
|
| A lot of what keeps people inline is implicitly or explicitly
| fear of what people might do. They're an unknown. It's why a
| burglar may not care about an alarm but a dog is a deterrent.
| Will that dog bite? Fear of those unknowns makes the burglar
| look for easier prey. Not always but statistically often. It's
| one reason why people get dogs.
|
| It's the whole basis for having doormen and the like in
| buildings over automated systems. That doorman is a much bigger
| unknown and can react in ways machines can't.
|
| It's the same on the road. There's only so rude or
| inconsiderate many drivers will be because they fear the
| consequences of road rage and such.
|
| So what happens when such a driver sees a car that is self-
| driving? It is absolutely naive to assume that drive won't
| change their behaviour.
|
| When flying through a forest, you're basically just dodging
| trees. Wildlife will tend to avoid you. Just identifying larger
| wildlife and steering clear of them is likely sufficient.
| Driving is just much more difficult.
|
| I'd say self-driving cars in the sense where the car isn't even
| designed to have a human driver anymore is at least 20+ years
| away (and, much like AGI, probably will remain that way for
| some time).
|
| Instead you'll have what we already have to some degree: driver
| assistance for the simpler parts of driving like staying in a
| lane on a highway and avoiding hitting the car in front of you.
| That's the easy part. Over time, more and more of those
| features will be automated. But it's still going to be a giant
| leap to autonomous driving.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Trees don't cross the street.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Trees don't cross the streets.
| adenverd wrote:
| The US DoD already has drones with these capabilities for recon
| in contested buildings and caves:
|
| https://vimeo.com/316222669
|
| https://shield.ai/products/nova-class
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/shield-ai-quadcopter-military-dr...
| soheil wrote:
| Not sure if it's a fair comparison when the links you posted do
| not include any real evidence of flight agility or video of the
| actual drone. It's probably because of classified nature of
| this project, but still we don't know how similar these
| capabilities are.
| Permit wrote:
| One thing that stood out to me is that they train it entirely on
| simulated data and deploy it without needing any fine-tuning on
| real-world data.
|
| I took one of Andrew Ng's deep learning courses a few years ago
| and remember him saying that this approach typically doesn't
| work. It sounds like that's no longer the case which is really
| cool because it's relatively cheap/easy to generate simulated
| data.
|
| Is this a more common approach these days? Are there any other
| interesting examples to point to?
| Matumio wrote:
| It seems the tide is turning for sim2real. This article "Robots
| Must Be Ephemeralized" goes into some details, recently posted
| on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28605633
| williamtrask wrote:
| This depends almost entirely on the accuracy of the simulated
| environment relative to the real world. If we have very
| accurate simulators then sim2real isn't too bad. If we have
| poor simulators (or simulators which don't fully capture that
| <0.1% probability action that happens to have REALLY bad
| consequences...) then sim2real doesn't work.
|
| Flying a drone through a static forrest in no-wind (no moving
| branches, etc.) seems like a reasonable sim2real environment,
| in part because... well... video games have had forrests and
| trees don't tend to move very fast unless there's wind.
|
| But sim2real for self driving cars is a lot harder given the
| huge diversity in streets and freak events that happen (people,
| bicycles, shopping carts, piano-delivery-trucks)
|
| - Twitter: @iamtrask
| adenverd wrote:
| I'll add that real world sensors (including cameras) are
| noisy in ways that are difficult to model 100% accurately in
| simulation. Same thing with aerodynamic effects, especially
| when the drone gets close to the ground or other objects, or
| y'know...it's windy outside. Dealing with these types of
| noise and unpredictably and building in resilience to them is
| a big part of testing and validating systems like these, and
| can only happen in the real world.
|
| I'm pretty confident the drone linked in this article doesn't
| have high reliability. I'd be shocked if they managed to get
| >70% critical without significant real-world iteration.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I think it basically helps that quadcopters are already
| computer stabilized and highly manoeuvrable so the problem
| is more identifying spaces to move into and motion planning
| through them. What's impressive since the last time this
| kind of thing was posted is the increase in speed and at
| least in the provided video the ability to avoid really
| quite small branches.
| apendleton wrote:
| It looks from the video someone linked to above that these
| things don't use cameras, just depth sensors -- maybe
| they're easier to simulate? It looks like they do introduce
| noise into their simulated depth-sensor data, but maybe
| that's more straightforward than creating realistic visual
| noise.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The simulation is a bit of a red herring, in this case. What
| operated in simulation was not the neural net but a different
| algorithm. The article calls it a "simulated expert" and my
| guess is that it was most likely a classical planner. This
| "simulated expert" was given all the information and,
| crucially, all the _time_ it needed to fly through a simulated
| environment (or possibly many more than one). The neural net
| was then trained on examples of the "simulated expert's"
| behaviour. Then the trained model was loaded onto the drone and
| was used to pilot the drone, essentially predicting the path
| the "simulated expert" would have taken in a similar situation.
|
| In short the "trick" is that they generated a plan offline and
| then learned to approximate it to avoid having to re-generate
| it for every flight, which is very time-consuming and wouldn't
| allow fast flight.
|
| It's clever and as the authors are quoted to say in the
| article, it doesn't rely on a very precise simulation, since
| the neural net doesn't have to be trained in a simulator and a
| classical planner doesn't need very granular detail (it's just
| slow). On the other hand, it's difficult to know how well it
| works in practice because "flying through a forest" is not
| really an objective measure, insofar as there is no ISO
| standard for what "forest" means. Sparse forest? Dense forest?
| Conifers? Other...? The news item above says that the approach
| was tested on "previously unseen" environments, but that, too,
| is a very fuzzy expression. So while this is very impressive
| news (without having read the original work) keep an open mind
| about whether this will really work in arbitrary environments
| in the real world.
| siekmanj wrote:
| The sim2real approach can work pretty well as long as you are
| _very_ in tune with where your simulator falls short relative
| to the real world and take steps to circumvent those
| shortcomings.
|
| Here's some work my lab did on sim2real for a roughly human-
| scale bipedal robot (Cassie):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPhEmC6b6XU
|
| We were able to train the robot to climb stairs completely by
| feel/proprioception without any sort of vision. We trained it
| in simulation, and then transferred it to the real world
| without issue.
| muds wrote:
| Yup! There are a ton of examples of this in robot learning. For
| instance: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10790 by NVIDIA uses
| photorealistic images and something we call domain
| randomization to efficiently bridge the sim2real gap for robot
| grasping.
|
| A core issue seems to be that the better the simulation, the
| harder it is to generate (compute wise) but simple tweaks to
| the generative process also go a long way.
| pieterk wrote:
| Those drones are so quiet, too! Awesome work!!
| Borrible wrote:
| A first step to your personal Holtzman shield:
|
| https://www.wikihow.com/Build-an-EMP-Generator
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| How long before a small explosive is strapped to the tip and
| aimed at humans with low social credit score? Would make for a
| Running Man sequel, with some future Caligula.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| We already have heat seeking missiles. Even better, they're
| much faster.
|
| (Missiles are the original drones. Cruise missile = single use
| drone.)
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Yes, but the innovation could be individual precise
| targeting. You could potentially keep a battery of these
| drones at every intersection. Track every human using phones,
| then deploy at will, at some threshold event, like a failed
| covid test, or mean post on fb against the dear leader.
| adrianN wrote:
| They also cost about three orders of magnitude more than a
| drone.
| vdfs wrote:
| Actually we have autonomous killing drones
| https://www.cnet.com/news/autonomous-drone-attacked-
| soldiers...
| 01100011 wrote:
| Explosives are only good for one hit. Knives(aka "Stabby the
| Robot") are good for many kills.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I'm not sure if you've seen the original Mortal Combat movie.
| There is a scene if I recall correctly where he's running
| away through a forest chased by such a knife.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| How about this? https://v.redd.it/93ahi2kxzwr71
| jcims wrote:
| Or this (airsoft drone): https://youtu.be/NS1KFmFw2Dw?t=230
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> or for security applications._
|
| Wanna bet where the money comes from?
| jjwiseman wrote:
| Nvidia did forest trail navigation several years ago; I wonder if
| it's a precursor to this.
| https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-researchers-release...
| 05 wrote:
| But.. can they deal with scraggle?
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Dystopian movies have obviously gotten it wrong. The attack
| drones won't be slowly scanning the forest for escapees above the
| canopy but will instead rip through the forest in large packs at
| 40km/hr. How uber-dystopian.
| xwdv wrote:
| And then, once finding the target, an explosive charge blows up
| in the drone to fire a single high speed projectile straight to
| the target, punching a hole clean through the forehead for a
| quick and humane death. You know you're finished once you've
| locked eyes with a drone, maybe next time don't break the law.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| >maybe next time don't break the law
|
| ...or engage in wrongthink. The Supreme Commander must never
| be questioned even in private, peasant.
| teeray wrote:
| These are basically the manhacks from Half Life 2
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. I used to hate those things. Half-Life 2 also had
| surveillance drones following people all over the city.
| mcphage wrote:
| Like the Langoliers...
| Iv wrote:
| American dystopian movies always give a chance to the hero
| because a good ending is like an unviolable law of the
| Hollywood universe.
|
| In reality, automated killing happens without the target
| receiving previous warning.
| Lio wrote:
| More like the end of the Sopranos then; it all goes black for
| the lead character.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Yes. I think anyone who wants to see the future of warfare
| should take a look at robot sumo wrestling:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS-L2fpV1Is
|
| The future is not Star Wars style fights where lumbering ships
| can't seem to reliably hit each other despite clear lines of
| sight. The future is fast, precise, sterile and not something a
| human can react to. The future is drones with knives slicing
| your jugular before you know they are coming.
|
| I'm an embedded SW programmer and the speed of computation
| still boggles my mind sometimes.
| [deleted]
| Lio wrote:
| I always liked Peter F. Hamilton's description of space
| battles from the Void trilogy that are all over in a fraction
| of a second.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Trilogy
| ovi256 wrote:
| It's the same in the Culture series. Near-God AI
| motherships manufacture combat psychopath AI ships by the
| thousand, which fight lower tech ships by overwritting
| their CPU caches with EM effectors (very advanced versions
| of phased array emitters) in milliseconds, taking them over
| for their side. Rarely it gets to anti-matter and particle
| beams.
| pmezard wrote:
| Well, "Excession" from the same series gets its fair
| share of psychopath AIs using anti-matter and particle
| beams during a few nanoseconds fight.
|
| From the same Iain Banks, "Against a Dark Background"
| features space battles where rules of engagement ban the
| use of AI-controlled weapons.
| iSnow wrote:
| Or Stanislaw Lem from 1964's "The Invincible" where
| autonomous drone swarms take out all life and complex
| machinery. In the story, they evolve, but a lot of the
| swarm behavior is similar to killer bot drone swarms like
| from the clip above.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible
| deadbolt wrote:
| This video was posted to HN a couple years ago. It's the
| first thing I think of whenever I watch one of these videos
| of new drone tech.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
|
| https://autonomousweapons.org/
| narrator wrote:
| The thing those movies get wrong is the moments of suspense
| when the slaughterbot is chasing it's victim. They'll be
| dead before they even contemplate running.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's not inconceivable that they'll follow their victims
| for a bit to make sure that the face recognition doesn't
| have a glitch.
|
| Apparently you can also recognize someone by the way they
| walk, so if you've recorded that before, getting them to
| run around for a bit provides an extra level of
| identification.
| vidarh wrote:
| Unless, of course, you don't care about collateral
| damage, in which case you might well kill first, verify
| second.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Of course, but then you don't use a stupid drone. You
| drop a hellfire missile from 10km up.
| vidarh wrote:
| If you're a nation state maybe. The question here is how
| far down the cost of drones like these will go, and how
| easy it will be to contain the technology.
| vitiral wrote:
| Thank you for your comforting assurances.
| pixxel wrote:
| Simply pop a small pebble in your shoe to change your
| gait /s
| giorgioz wrote:
| I remember the video with the swarm of tiny drones dropped
| from the airplane. It's very unrealistic in my opinion.
|
| 3 types of problems:
|
| 1) quadcopters battery is not great (yet) 2) AI is very
| specialized 3) You underestimate how fast and creative a
| human being is when survival is at stake.
|
| 1) quadcopters battery is not great (yet) Quadcopters must
| balance weight, energy and payload. Essentially drones
| don't fly very long and any payload you add will increase
| their weight and decrease their speed or flying time. In
| the video the tiny drones are released from an airplane.
| Already not sure if that would work, what about wind and
| altitude? The drones might spend a significant part of
| their battery just to reach the ground. They might be so
| light that a gentle breeze would swipe them hundreds of
| meters away. Even if battery will be better there will
| always be a constraint on what it's possible to do and how
| much it cost to build it. In the video the announcer says
| 25 million USD for enough drones to wipe a city. Let's say
| there are 5 million in the city and half is 2.5 million
| people. Your budget than is 10USD per drone. Clearly that
| budget is just too small.
|
| 2) AI is very specialized Just because an AI can beat the
| world champion at chess doesn't mean it can do anything
| else at all. Take the same AI and change the chess board
| size or another fixed parameter of chess. The AI will
| likely not work at all without being retrained while a
| human being will still manage to figure it out on the spot.
|
| 3) Underestimating humans Alright somehow the tiny drones
| with explosives reach the room. It's not like in nature we
| don't have insects and birds flying at us. People have
| reflexes to fly or fight. Most people would duck or protect
| their face with hands. If you think the drone will be too
| fast remember it's a 10USD drone dropped from an airplane.
| Frankly it's a miracle even if manages to land on the
| ground.
| WA wrote:
| Dude, this is what could happen easily within 10 years.
| What is your point? That the video doesn't show the
| reality of 2021?
|
| How about you sign up for the "escape the AI
| slaughterbots challenge" in 2030. Win $10,000 if you
| survive the 1,000 Slaughterbots trying to kill you.
| imtringued wrote:
| Depending on the capabilities of the drones that could be
| absurdly trivial. GPS jamming scales to an infinite
| number of drones.
|
| For medium capability drones your budget is already in
| the millions so it is only fair to use a medium
| capability air defense system:
| https://youtu.be/1DXpPmpmcak
|
| Edit: Before you say that I don't get to defend myself
| according to the threat level then a single person
| beating me to death would be enough to kill me. Not very
| interesting.
| marvin wrote:
| It's naive to assume military research labs don't have
| this in an advanced state of development right now, or
| even combat-ready weapons that just haven't been used
| yet.
|
| I mean, it's obviously possible. That means militaries
| have at the very least developed it to a proof of concept
| by now. This kind of tech often exists for many years
| before becoming publically known.
| lolc wrote:
| I have no problem seeing this as realistic.
|
| > 1) quadcopters battery is not great
|
| Dropping does not require energy. A drone-mothership will
| obviously take wind in account when dropping the
| dronelets. The video was not realistic in that regard
| because the drones would probably be folded for initial
| descent.
|
| I find USD 10 is not unrealistic. Already now a device
| with battery, chip, and motor can be manufactured for
| under that. It will get cheaper.
|
| 2) AI is very specialized
|
| We've just seen how a drone navigates autonomously at
| high speed without crashing. They don't need much more to
| be killers.
|
| 3) Underestimating humans
|
| You have to be prepared to react well to a drone attack
| like that. These things will not wait around for you to
| figure it out.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Dropping does not require energy. A drone-mothership
| will obviously take wind in account when dropping the
| dronelets. The video was not realistic in that regard
| because the drones would probably be folded for initial
| descent.
|
| That already exists. It's called GBU-39/B Small Diameter
| Bomb (SDB) and it has been obsoleted already by the
| GBU-53/B StormBreaker. Yet nobody is freaking out.
|
| https://youtu.be/CxePhkdIo0o
|
| https://youtu.be/hyaIrhGrCzo
|
| Ohh and even a nice fictional animation:
| https://youtu.be/n8u0l_c2_NA
| outside1234 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing - terrifying
| user982 wrote:
| "...how in the name of chaos did a lump of meat outwit and
| destroy a _knife missile_?"
| saltyfamiliar wrote:
| Yes, I've been saying this for years. Everyone seems to
| overlook the massive speed advantage they could have over us.
| Even if they're not trying to kill us, aside from for
| interacting with humans, there is no reason that they would
| be constrained to operating at human compatible speeds. It's
| possible that we could see them as operating on a completely
| different time scale than us, similar to how we see fungus.
| oska wrote:
| Elon Musk got mocked when he talked about robots moving so
| fast you'd need a strobe light to see them but typically for
| Musk he was just a bit too early in his timeline. Definitely
| the way things are going; why wouldn't they?
| vdfs wrote:
| Autonomous killing drones are already here
| https://www.cnet.com/news/autonomous-drone-attacked-
| soldiers...
| jmnicolas wrote:
| While I have the same feeling as you, let's not forget that
| those things don't have unlimited range and are vulnerable to
| simple tools like a shotgun.
|
| Anyway if they have infrared cameras, they'd be more efficient
| by scanning the forest high in the sky and if they just rely on
| normal cameras, good old camouflage still works.
|
| I could be wrong but IMHO we're entering a period of
| rarefaction of resources. I don't think in the future they will
| waste precious resources like energy and drones to hunt common
| people, it will be reserved for high profile cases.
| narrator wrote:
| In the future, the bad guys never miss. This is what 90% of pop
| sci-fi gets wrong.
|
| Speaking of fast, the Russians now have hypersonic missiles
| that go roughly 14,000 miles per hour. That's more than 3 miles
| a second! If you have a missile defense on board a ship, that
| means the missile defense has to detect, target and kill that
| missile in just a few seconds maximum.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| Yep, we might face a world where gun drones have perfect
| accuracy from hundreds of meters away as well as split second
| kill on sight decision making. You'd be dead before you'd see
| it coming.
| mabbo wrote:
| While I see the obvious dystopian version of this, I'd still like
| to see this tech in the hands of search and rescue teams.
|
| People get lost in the woods all the time. Image a swarm of 100
| of these drones, 200, 500, all flying at 40km/h in a coordinated
| sweep, searching with multi-spectrum cameras and image
| recognition.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Problem is still that they might not fly for more than 20
| minutes, especially if you add a lot of sensory and processing
| power.
|
| I have an older gen drone and they are amazing dust cleaners
| when you launch them in your appartment. Only slightly
| irratates they eyes.
|
| But honestly I think power is still the technical barrier and
| the reason we don't yet have drones for package delivery. They
| won't fail because of sensory or software.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Next gen drones of that size can reach 60km/h and I don't think
| trees can significantly slow them down. So the end will at
| least come fast.
| causi wrote:
| What I really want is a drone with a robust recovery system. I
| want it to be able to hit tree limbs, fall to the ground, but
| then right itself and take off again.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Police, military and SAR have this already in helicopters.
|
| With good equipment you can scan large areas using only one
| helicopter.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| SAR is a statistical numbers game. Each search method
| provides some degree of certainty of coverage. Aircraft can't
| see through trees and thermographic cameras have a tough time
| seeing hypothermic or dead people. Ground search is still
| necessary even after a helicopter or fixed wing aircraft have
| gone over a search zone.
|
| A swarm of drones would allow a rapid search of an area with
| similar coverage statistics as a manned ground search. But a
| drone going 40 km/h could miss subtle clues like footprints
| or freshly broken branches.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| All of this tech _can_ also be used for good. They 're
| introducing that new Wifi standard because they claim it can
| help monitor elderly people's heart rates. Surveillance cameras
| are there against street crime and they scan our private data
| in the cloud to prevent child pornography. Or take a look at
| this pilot project in China:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/q32799/bec...
|
| Somehow the idea of autonomous winged cameras flying around all
| over the place does not make me feel safe.
| neither_color wrote:
| It's interesting how they sell this over there vs in the
| west. In the west you get very ominous, 1984 panopticon
| connotations whenever cameras are introduced. You never see
| this back and forth dialogue between your friendly overlords
| and the people being watched.
| EGreg wrote:
| No need for autonomous winged cameras, even
|
| A network of tiny cameras paired with wifi, can identify
| everyone all the time. You also carry your phone on you and
| now with Apple's latest improvements it won't really be "off"
| when you turn it off.
|
| They can hear through windows, lip read, and anything else.
| All that's missing is a database that will cross compile all
| this information to reconstruct everywhere youwere and
| everything you've been doing, and your health characteristics
| at every moment. From there it's pretty trivial AI to make
| sure to do precrime and nip "undesirable" gatherings or
| movements in the bud before they have a chance to take root.
|
| Ironically, the one place you MAY have privacy would be end
| to end encryptednetworks online.
| njarboe wrote:
| "All that's missing is a database..."
|
| Did you forget about this[1]?
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
| rasz wrote:
| I can imagine cleanup effort required trying to recover 10-20%
| of those drones after crashes/battery depletion, resulting in
| littering forest with garbage.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| You can just send a bunch of drones to clean up after it /s
| pengaru wrote:
| Shouldn't be terribly difficult to embed a compact and
| durable EPIRB kind of thing for locating when unable to
| return...
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Maybe we can have a drone swarm that cleans up the crashed
| drones. You should have a fairly good idea of where they are
| when they crash so you wouldn't need to do a full sweep of
| the location.
| nirui wrote:
| Maybe a controversial opinion, but I think it's a rather
| reasonable trade-off compare to say left someone dying in the
| woods.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> someone dying in the woods.
|
| Lots of people do die in the woods. It's a daily thing.
| What is much rarer is to know that someone is _dying in the
| woods_. The scenarios whereby these drones are lifesavers
| are only those where a search has been launch and the lost
| person is still alive but in peril of death. And even with
| 100+ drones you still need to know the area of the person.
| The woods can be very big.
|
| The more efficient method, by far, is to have a device on
| the person from the start. Better coordination between
| search and cellular providers would do much in reducing
| search areas, at least when looking for people carrying
| cellphones.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Like EPIRBs! The tech already exists and works anywhere
| on the planet with no dependence on cell towers. I've
| decided that if I ever go hiking in the woods, I'm going
| to get HAM certified and carry a GPS radio with a beacon,
| just in case.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-
| indicating_...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Those only work for people that know that they need help
| and are able to activate the device. They don't work for
| people who do not know how bad a situation they are in
| and/or are injured to the point that they cannot activate
| the device.
| nirui wrote:
| Let's don't get ourselves lost in the maze of arguments
| here.
|
| The big picture is, if you give the rescue team a good
| tool, their success rate will then increase, sometime by
| a big number.
|
| There is a documentary about children missing in the
| woods called Missing 411
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEA9-mEOZtA). If you
| take look their search efforts, it is not hard to realize
| how many weight can be lifted by an automatic area
| scanning system.
|
| In the documentary, the search and rescue team had to
| walk step by step doing almost blind searches. If you
| have an automatic system, you can just launch a scanning
| array of say 50 drones, very quickly the data will come
| in and provide indications on where the search effort
| should be prioritized.
|
| Bottom line is, such system is better than the current
| (human manual search) one. If the technology can be
| properly developed and utilized, it can help save more
| lives.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Except that when you are looking for kids, and to a
| lesser extent elderly people, they become afraid and
| hide. Some rescued children talk of cyclops-like giants
| hunting them in the dark ... rescuers with headlamps.
| They hide from the people trying to find them, which
| makes friendly dogs a particularly powerful tool as
| nobody can really hide from a labrador. These people will
| probably hide from a swarm of drones too. I would.
| nirui wrote:
| > Except that when you are looking for kids, and to a
| lesser extent elderly people, they become afraid and
| hide.
|
| Then maybe let each drone carry a Teddy Bear or/and a
| Rainbow Pony. I mean I would totally grab the wild drone
| for it's micro controllers.
|
| Now, the truth is, we don't know how people would
| actually react to drones. Maybe a kid would hide even
| deeper, but that's an edge case here. The important thing
| is, this tool can generate real benefit for a rescue
| operation that no other tool can provide. How to use it
| properly is the responsibility of the rescue team.
|
| Another thing is, with information provided by drones,
| the search and rescue operation itself can become safer.
| Which also enables a load of new possibilities.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Just because it can save more lives doesn't mean it
| overall 'better'. Because you're saving more lives at the
| cost of hugely increased ecological impact.
| dralley wrote:
| Unless it ignites a forest fire
| [deleted]
| poopsmithe wrote:
| put the fire out with more drones problem solved and
| nobody dies
| amelius wrote:
| Also:
|
| https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-07/thousand.
| ..
|
| > As many as 2,000 elegant tern eggs were abandoned on a
| nesting island at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in
| Huntington Beach after a drone crashed, scaring off the
| would-be parents.
| imtringued wrote:
| If a drone is damaged while surveilling you and you don't
| turn it in, they will deduct points from your social credit.
| daemoncoder wrote:
| With the 'no drone left behind' policy, there will be drones
| to fetch injured drones.
| mabbo wrote:
| While I actually agree with your point, I have this image
| in my mind if a "Simpsons-esq" scene like
|
| "Mr Burns, we've lost 20% of our drones"
|
| "Well then... Send more drones!"
|
| But honestly, if the drones are operating as a swarm then a
| downed drone could report it's last known location to it's
| peers for easier recovery.
| xwdv wrote:
| Make them biodegradable.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Image a swarm of 100 of these drones, 200, 500, all flying at
| 40km/h in a coordinated sweep, searching with multi-spectrum
| cameras and image recognition.
|
| Now imagine those machines chasing down a thought criminal
| desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid
| execution.
| bluecalm wrote:
| The law enforcement is already equipped well enough to get
| you if you lead a normal life (addresses, phone etc.). The
| technology won't change that. It can be used for things they
| are not as good at though like finding people lost in the
| woods or chasing criminals. I mean, if they deem you a "a
| thought criminal" they can just knock on your door and take
| you to jail. They don't need a swarm of drones to achieve it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm imagining them in a snowy forest chasing a boy carrying a
| baby, while the boy uses memories of coldness to hide them
| from the heat-sensitive cameras on the drones.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I can say I absolutely didn't understand the importance or
| impact of some books they made me read in elementary school
| until years later.
| bostik wrote:
| We don't need to imagine, someone already did. Just search
| for "Slaughterbots".
| belter wrote:
| "Slaughterbots":
|
| https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Holy shit that's horrifying. You can depopulate a whole
| country with that and then just move into it.
| imtringued wrote:
| According to my napkin math it would cost 1.5 trillion
| USD to kill every American with drones and I am already
| assuming very cheap and capable ones, that you deploy
| them near the target and that the target is incapable of
| defending itself. The cost of deployment itself isn't
| even included. Nuclear weapons are very cheap in
| comparison.
| ajuc wrote:
| > Now imagine those machines chasing down a thought criminal
| desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid
| execution.
|
| If you're hiding in a forest and they know where you are
| within 30 minutes of flying time - you've already lost. If
| they don't have drones they can just use dogs.
|
| The problems with this situation to solve, sorted by
| priority:
|
| - don't have a totalitarian state
|
| - don't let them know your thoughts
|
| - escape to a different country while you can
|
| - don't let them know in which forest you're hiding
|
| - don't let them know where exactly
|
| Drones only change the last point, and only marginally at
| that. Meanwhile we're collectively helping the internet
| overlords with the first 4 points by carrying smartphones
| everywhere and using google and facebook and whatsup etc.
| titzer wrote:
| > - don't have a totalitarian state
|
| Except that democracies can and do slip into totalitarian
| rule by autocrats who declare themselves the winner of
| elections and then obliterate their political opponents.
|
| > - don't let them know your thoughts
|
| Uh, whoops, they just know everything you ever searched
| for, watched, or bought online, who your friends and lovers
| are, where you live, what music you listen to, and what
| your genetic history is!
|
| > - escape to a different country while you can
|
| Except COVID and visas drying up, and anti-immigration
| sentiment rising everywhere.
|
| > - don't let them know in which forest you're hiding
|
| Better disable GPS on every device near me then! As well as
| disable every "CC" camera that's just for "security".
| Better also shoot down any surveillance drones or
| satellites!
|
| > - don't let them know where exactly
| ajuc wrote:
| That was my point? These are the hard problems that need
| to be solved, not drones.
|
| The solution is almost never technology, it's usually
| politics and legislation.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| So let's just give everyone nuclear weapons and hope for
| the best.
| jsilence wrote:
| A mandatory gun for every person, but everyone only gets
| one slug.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| That's existentially very clever
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And above those: Don't do a crime that will get you
| executed.
| titzer wrote:
| Or...ever be accused or framed for one.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Sometimes that's out of your hand. The people killed in
| Nazi Germany had no choice in being Jewish or disabled.
|
| Governments can change for the worse pretty quickly, if
| you have one competent charismatic guy with the wrong
| ambitions. So we would better not give such people the
| tools to keep their power, if it ever comes to that.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Or queer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr
| _Sexualwissen...
| wokkel wrote:
| Like declaring yourself independent of the english crown.
| Basically the usa wouldn't exist if they had tech like
| this in the past.
| goatlover wrote:
| And yet, Afghanistan exists today as an independent
| Taliban state. I think the English would still have
| trouble projecting power across the pond indefinitely.
| tim333 wrote:
| We have enough problems running functional petrol
| stations these days.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Sometimes that crime is having the audacity to exist.
| roenxi wrote:
| The point is reasonable; but drones are quite different to
| dogs.
|
| I imagine it is much cheaper maintain 100 drones, truck
| them to where they are needed and have them swarm with some
| level of facial or gait recognition than the equivalent
| operation would be with dogs.
|
| Also this could be centrally coordinated with cameras a lot
| more cheaply over a wider area than at any point in the
| past, with fewer people and less requirement for locals to
| dob people in.
|
| > ...don't have a totalitarian state...
|
| After COVID, I'm not sure how feasible this step is.
| "People should be allowed to leave their homes without
| first having the required paperwork" does not even appear
| to be a consensus view. And speaking from Australia even
| that would be a step up from what we have had recently.
| EGreg wrote:
| The same exact argument can be made against end-to-end
| encryption that is resilint against state actors ... if you
| have to resort to sneaking around, your society has already
| lost politically. Fix your government.
| ajuc wrote:
| Well, yes. But in one case you're arguing for ban on
| technology (drones) and in another you're arguing against
| banning technology (encryption).
|
| It's much easier not to ban something than to ban it,
| especially when the state is hostile.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The drones also solve the second to last point, if they
| make it viable to just sweep all forests within travel
| distance.
|
| That's the important difference between dogs and drones:
| you can't substantially bring down the price of trained
| dogs with handlers. The costs of drones on the other hand
| are guaranteed to go down with scale, both in terms of
| capital costs and operating costs. So if your dystopian
| goal can't be achieved by a couple drones, just deploy more
| of them.
| EGreg wrote:
| Compare this:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
|
| With this:
|
| USA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jlm2olEyXI
|
| INDIA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq2kJlbUXEw
| imtringued wrote:
| Reality is boring. The drones will be used for
| surveillance but the death will be delivered by regular
| firearms. The holocaust was "expensive" enough to justify
| shipping people into a central location where they are
| executed as efficiently as possible. What makes people
| think that a government would be willing to spend $5000
| per killed civilian when it has to kill hundreds of
| millions?
| adwn wrote:
| Humanity has repeatedly proven that it is capable of extreme,
| systematic cruelty without high-tech gadgets (take the
| Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, for example). Why do you
| think that autonomous drones would make this worse?
|
| _" Now imagine an angry mob chasing down a thought criminal
| desperately trying to hide in the woods in order to avoid
| execution."_
|
| This isn't any less frightning, in my opinion.
| blfr wrote:
| Holocaust was so striking to contemporaries, despite
| genocide being fairly common in history, at least in part
| because of its technological efficiency.
|
| Technology also allows for more leverage. Hitler need an
| entire modern nation state with millions of people, semi-
| autonomous robots may give this power to a group of
| thousands.
| [deleted]
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| No,to produce them you need thousands.
|
| To control them you need one- or even none.
|
| You could program a ethereum smart-contract virus, which
| hires people to scam money, produce slaughterbots, ship
| them to a city and strategically hit the soft underbelly
| aka airports, roads and railways and communication.
|
| If you stack the attack into waves and have the
| slaughterbot parcels piled into flats by gig workers, you
| can have a ideology free terror attack that kills
| millions.
|
| Such ATTAC-CELLs without members, are part of my games
| lore.
|
| Here is a picture of a standardized factory, made from
| standardized components, making "slaughterbots" made from
| standardized components.
|
| https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&i
| d=1...
|
| https://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?mode=view&i
| d=1...
|
| PS: The main building block is a sort of hangrenadesized
| fuel-container, with a fuelcell useable fuel that can be
| chemically primed to be a explosive. A standardized
| battery that could be exploded would do too..
| DeWilde wrote:
| Not really, Genghis and the other khans killed more than
| Hitler using a fairly simple technique: divide the
| captives by the number of your soldiers and each soldier
| is tasked with killing the captives assigned to them.
| They usually had around 100k soldiers, armed with bows
| and knives, and killed tens of millions.
|
| My point is, you don't need technology to achieve bad
| things and it is the wrong thing we are focusing on when
| trying to prevent these things. Nukes can already
| annihilate billions yet here we are, not being
| annihilated by nukes.
| jdasdf wrote:
| >Why do you think that autonomous drones would make this
| worse?
|
| Because it reduces the costs of doing it.
| adwn wrote:
| It doesn't really. Take the Rwandan genocide, they used
| machetes and guns. Or lynch mobs: All you need is some
| rope, and maybe pitch forks.
| imtringued wrote:
| People overestimate the cost of bullets and underestimate
| the cost of advanced military weapons (drones in this
| case).
| freeflight wrote:
| The Holocaust is a pretty bad example for "cruelty without
| high-tech".
|
| Nazis had census data on millions of people reaching back
| decades, to sort trough that data, and search it for
| "undesirables", they employed computation tech that was
| cutting edge for its time [0], just like the methods of
| killing millions of people saw quite some industrialized
| innovation.
|
| As such it's a rather blatant example for the whole new
| levels of cruelty technology can enable humans to do.
|
| The progress also didn't just stop there, what the Gestapo
| and Stasi did, is child's play compared to the amount and
| details of data that can nowadays be trivially collected on
| whole population scales [1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
|
| [1] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-
| nsa/english.html
| thaufeki wrote:
| Yeah, imagine the holocaust with these drones, or any of
| the surveillance tech we have these days.
|
| If a G7 state were to change in that way again, they
| would almost certainly achieve their eradication goals
| imtringued wrote:
| I can already imagine people complain how the military is
| wasting its budget on drones and should reinstate German
| extermination camps to save money.
| ajuc wrote:
| Majority of Jews during WW2 died outside of
| death/concentration camps [1]. Army, police or SS rounded
| up Jews in some majority-Jewish town or village, took
| them to a nearby forest, forced them to dig their graves
| and then shot everybody. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes non-
| Jews helped, or even did it without Germans. Sometimes
| they helped Jews and were killed with them. Sometimes
| Germans just killed everybody. Sometimes they had list of
| people to kill for political reason (for example
| university professors, priests, politicians, army
| officers, teachers etc. were targeted no matter their
| ethnicity).
|
| Vast majority of Jews before WW2 lived in small mostly-
| Jewish towns and villages in eastern Poland and western
| USSR. It would be inefficient to move them to death
| camps, also you could steal from them when you murdered
| them. Win-win.
|
| There was no need for technology, nazis weren't checking
| the papers or bothering with recording anything. There
| are thousands of mass graves near formerly-Jewish towns.
| Non-Jewish population was mostly helping to point the
| Jews because they were competing for food and resources
| during harsh occupation conditions, and besides Germans
| were mass-murdering non-Jews too, just as a lower
| priority. And if you protested you were Jewish too,
| right?
|
| According to Timothy Snyder the main difference between
| countries where high or low percentage of Jews survived
| nazi occupation wasn't antisemitism but how much pre-war
| institutions were preserved. In countries where the nazi
| occupation was negotiated and the rule of law was
| preserved - it took months to confirm these people were
| Jews, move them to camps, sort them, etc.
|
| In places like eastern Europe - where Germans just
| destroyed everything and law was practically non-existant
| - why would you bother with all of that? It was basically
| 4 years of the Purge. 1/6th of the population disappeared
| in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Jews were about 10% of
| pre-war population.
|
| The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't
| necessary. The only technology nazis needed was firearms.
| And they could probably do it with knives and sticks if
| they really wanted - like in Rwanda. Or like in USSR or
| Communist China for that matter.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
| gambiting wrote:
| >>There was no need for technology, nazis weren't
| checking the papers or bothering with recording anything.
|
| Most of what you said is true, except for this part.
| Nazis did make actual recordings(as in - videos) of
| exterminations conducted in eastern Poland, especially in
| the area that is now Ukraine, conducted both by
| themselves as well as the local population(threatened
| with death otherwise of course), all to show back in
| Third Reich as proof fo barbarism in the countries they
| were conquering. I really recommend reading Stanislaw
| Lem's biography on that topic, since he lived in pre and
| in-war Lwow.
|
| >>The involvement of IBM was shameful, but it wasn't
| necessary.
|
| I mean, that's a bit of a weird argument to make. Yes,
| places like Auschwitz could have exterminated as many
| people as they did even without IBM's help, but the whole
| point is that Nazis liked efficiency and the tech allowed
| them to keep track of what they were doing(in the
| concentration camps, like you said outside of them Nazis
| didn't bother to track much of anything)
| gambiting wrote:
| On the IBM front - IBM helped Nazi Germany run
| concentration camps, the number tatooed on every prisoner
| was an IBM-managed inventory number, they had offices and
| workshops near concentration camps to help run, operate
| and maintain the machines used by the Nazis, as much as
| IBM would like to forget that part of history now. So
| yes, Nazis were definitely using cutting edge tech for
| its time to help with their extermination efforts.
|
| https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ICISEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT298
| &lp...
| mabbo wrote:
| I mean, sure, that's the dystopian version.
|
| But the problem to me with that vision is the existence of
| "thought crimes" and not the method by which such criminals
| are being chased.
|
| The government isn't waiting to pass thought crime laws
| because they just don't quite yet have the ability to search
| a forest for people. That's not the big barrier here.
|
| But people are still lost in the woods.
| kitd wrote:
| Well, if it wasn't drones it would be something else.
|
| Or in other words, should we slow or stop technological
| advances because they may get into the wrong hands?
|
| And, for part 2, who decides what's wrong?
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| 1: Yes. That's exactly what we've tried to do with nuclear
| weapons and it's still pretty controlled.
|
| 2: Everyone. It's sort of a planetary wide, group decision.
| lm28469 wrote:
| The amount of energy, tech and brain power we're spending on
| ever lower impact / less rewarding topics is scary. It's
| equally dystopian to me to be honest
| nspattak wrote:
| The same is true for any human achievement: humans have used
| fire to burn other people as well as stay warm and metallurgy,
| knifes as tools or for war etc.
|
| autonomous drones can clearly be very useful.
| blunte wrote:
| > The new approach could be useful in emergencies, on
| construction sites or for security applications.
|
| Fleeing into the woods will no longer be an option...
| kypro wrote:
| Not that I don't also find this dystopian, but thermal cameras
| have been a thing for years and they're already pretty good at
| catching people who flee into the woods.
| pzo wrote:
| You also have many animals in the woods that will show up on
| thermal camera. It's a different level of scale, sending
| humans with thermal cameras, walking slowly and identifying
| if someone is human or animal versus dozen drones doing the
| same things autonomously and much faster than human.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| What's the range of those things? And as said elsewhere,
| they're vulnerable to a shotgun.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| 2018 https://spectrum.ieee.org/skydio-r1-drone
| beej71 wrote:
| That's pretty amazing. I vote we use it for good.
|
| (Though that POV shot in the forest looked straight out of Evil
| Dead II.)
| ctrlp wrote:
| Just like Star Wars speeder bikes. Could these have made the
| filming of that scene simpler? [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTHXig8ZdTI
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The crucial difference is their use of a stereo depth camera.
|
| Great to see good tech deployed in the wild, but I'm not terribly
| impressed by the machine learning side of this.
| kepano wrote:
| This is great. About ~6 years ago there was a story on HN from
| MIT titled "Self-flying drone dips, darts and dives through trees
| at 30 mph"[0]. It was a fixed wing drone, rather cautiously
| flying near a few trees. At the time my comment was:
|
| > I guess I was expecting something more like this goshawk flying
| through a forest, but maybe it's too much to ask for :)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-_RHRAzUHM&start=100
|
| Now 6 years later, the drone seems almost on par with the
| capabilities of the goshawk. Pretty amazing!
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10495966
| andrei821 wrote:
| In Romania, Rangers and activists are often threatened or even
| beaten by wood thefts. Drones can be a highly effective method of
| stopping deforestation.
| [deleted]
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Don't be distracted by the apparent application. This is academic
| work. The achievement is the state estimation and control
| sufficient to fly fast around a semi-structured environment
| without a map.
|
| No one really cares very much about flying fast through trees,
| though it's cool as hell. The point is that they are pushing the
| performance envelope so that more applications fall inside it.
|
| Davide's team has made great contributions in sensing and
| controls for UAVs over the years. Great stuff.
| EGreg wrote:
| This is incredible !
|
| 1) Make a simulation of the world for monte carlo
|
| 2) Do complex processing for obstacle avoidance
|
| 3) Make the drones "learn" from only the internal states what to
| do
|
| And voila, you teach a new robot old tricks
| fjdiod wrote:
| http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/Loquercio21_Science.pdf Original paper
| mLuby wrote:
| There's so-called "nuclear breakout time" for how quickly a non-
| nuclear nation could create nuclear weapons.[1]
|
| Time for a similar "slaughterbot breakout time."[2] However
| unlike with nuclear weapons, this is something a small team or
| even individual could soon achieve and then hold as a deterrent
| or use for sociopolitical aims.[3]
|
| It's easy to imagine an arms race between drones and the tiny
| point defense turrets (likely lasers, maybe kinetics or even
| EMPs) trying to disable them, both systems operating far faster
| than humans can react. In a strange way, wars fought like this
| may involve less loss of life, with soldiers surrendering to a
| cloud of slaughterbots that destroyed the automated defenses in
| seconds.
|
| This forthcoming ability to intimidate and harm precisely,
| anonymously, robotically, and _at scale_ makes autocracy more
| likely and more durable. [1]: https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation#Breakout_capability [2]:
| "Slaughterbots TED talk." https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA [3]:
| "Hated in the Nation" Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 6 (Netflix)
| angelzen wrote:
| > wars fought like this may involve less loss of life
|
| Western audiences forget why wars were often fought to the last
| man. Mass murder could often be the merciful option. Vae
| victis.
|
| A military superpower unwilling to impose its will through
| sheer brutality is a huge historical outlier. As Pax Americana
| disintegrates, new powers will arise in its wake. ISIS was a
| brief glimpse into the future.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The trick is going to be improved friend/foe detection.
| Historically, wars simply ended when the victor would kill
| all remaining enemy soldiers and enslaved their families and
| other people inside the areas they were defending. Brutal but
| effective.
|
| The last century since basically WWII and especially the
| Vietnam war, we've seen increasingly less brutal wars where
| harming innocents is seen as a negative (in the case of
| Vietnam, that was what eroded the will to fight). Lately,
| we're seeing a type of asynchronous war fare where huge
| armies are effectively powerless because an insignificant
| opponent is hiding among civilians delivering very minor
| attacks with no strategic relevance. There are a whole range
| of stale mate situations across especially the middle east
| where the attacking side is simply hard to root out without
| lots of undesirable casualties among civilians. Just ask the
| Israeli's. They live tens of kilometers away from people
| willing to die to risk launching rockets at them, despite the
| fact these rockets rarely hit anything. It's been the status
| quo for the last decades. Their military is big enough that
| it keeps foreign countries from trying to invade but
| domestically, it's clearly not able to end the conflict.
|
| Stalin would have ended that conflict in no time. There would
| be no-one remaining to figut, the local language would be
| Russian, and there might be a new Palestine presence
| somewhere deep in Siberia. His successor Putin has fared less
| well in Chechnya mainly because he would suffer
| internationally if he did it the Stalin way.
|
| Guerilla warfare is dependent on the other side being humane
| enough or unwilling to not want to cause unnecessary
| casualties. As long as attackers manage to hide, they can't
| be hunted down without large amounts of innocents dying. WWII
| style leveling of entire cities is very much frowned upon
| now. I live in such a city (Berlin).
|
| However, the ability for guerilla fighters to hide after an
| attack is time sensitive and critical to their survival.
| Drones swarming an area would make that a lot harder. Urban
| warfare particularly is dreaded by armies because of high
| casualty rates related to simply not knowing where the enemy
| is and the need to fight door to door to find them. This
| could fix that. It could be over in minutes. It won't end all
| wars but it will make particularly guerilla warfare a lot
| harder.
|
| ISIS could be a thing of the past. The next engagements with
| the likes of those might be short, brutal, and effective.
| Minimum (but not less) loss of life, maximum effectiveness.
| It would follow months of covert mapping the territory,
| inventorying its inhabitants, and tracking all their
| movements followed by a few minutes of mayhem. Some people
| find that scary but they forget what decades long of conflict
| or a real war looks like.
| iSnow wrote:
| IDK. First, I don't believe there will be any kind of
| surgical precision with autonomous weapons systems. Human
| drone operators have taken out way too many weddings for my
| liking, and the German army obliterated a lot of people
| gathering around a stuck tanker.
|
| Second, with a delay of say 10 years, swarm autonomous
| drones will be in the hand of insurgents. We've seen how
| ISIS took out tanks and troop by dropping tank shells from
| drones. They are not dumb and will happily adopt drone
| swarms. The science and IT is out there.
|
| It is true that armies have a harder time carpet-bombing
| cities, but at the same time, what modern armies hate even
| more is losing their own guys. Even a semi-capable killer
| drone swarm could make it real hard to take _and hold_
| cities if seemingly out of the blue your buddies drop dead.
| Insurgents typically will not care that much if there 's
| dead civilians if they can terrorize invasion forces.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I would take my chances against a slaughterbot everytime
| compared to more mundane things like mustard gas.
|
| A slaughterbot obviously needs melee weapons and needs to be
| athletic. Ballistic platforms are probably far more effective,
| but it doesn't send the right message.
| pzo wrote:
| 1) current small racing drones have speed >80mph, that's 35
| meters per 1 second. You won't even have time to hear them
| and react while under attack.
|
| 2) current drones already have 4 tiny knives (blades). Enough
| to make it slightly larger/sharper and/or from titanium
| instead of plastic. That's enough to cut your throat or wrist
| and let you bleed to death ...
|
| 3) ... cover those blades with some venom or poison for
| "extra efficiency"
|
| 4) ... they probably don't even need some bullet - enough to
| detect your eye and stab you with a nail covered with
| venom/poison
|
| I doubt you would have any chance with just a dozen of
| slaughterbots.
|
| edit: formatting
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Probably not, but I also have noch chance against mustard
| gas and bleeding out seems at least preferable.
|
| Drones are extremely loud, especially those that fly that
| fast and small. If you have finely mashed net or large
| piece of cloth, drone already get into trouble.
| WA wrote:
| I would bet on the 1,000 Slaugherbots coming for you. Why do
| you assume it has to be only one?
|
| Slaughterbots could carry a small explosive, just like in the
| video. Doesn't have to be melee.
| dan_mctree wrote:
| Why would they need melee? Just attach a lightweight single
| use gun barrel on top
| raxxorrax wrote:
| It just wouldn't be the same dystopic feeling when they use
| guns.
| imtringued wrote:
| Because then people would realize that soldiers are just as
| lethal or perhaps even more lethal than drones.
| XorNot wrote:
| The problem with the Slaughterbots narrative is it's not
| actionable.
|
| We can choose not to build nuclear weapons: they're weapons
| with lots of weapons specific research associated.
|
| But drones aren't. The technology is general use: it's a
| natural consequence of a couple hundred incremental
| improvements, and the only difference between "weapon" and
| harmless is a software parameter and a payload.
|
| "Find and kill this person" is indistinguishable to a search
| and rescue AI, just with "on found and centre camera"
| triggering a bullet or a spike or a bomb and not text
| notification.
| f7ebc20c97 wrote:
| Guns are also "easy" to manufacture, but are successfully
| restricted.
|
| The clear outcome of this is the current ptb enslaving the
| world without needing so much as a police force.
| rpmisms wrote:
| > Guns are also "easy" to manufacture, but are successfully
| restricted
|
| Hahaha. This is a privileged take. 3d printing guns has
| been a thing for years now, and the FGC-9 (Fuck Gun Control
| 9mm) is a carbine that uses zero restricted firearms parts.
|
| Gun control is in serious danger of becoming completely
| obsolete.
|
| Edit: I'd like to add that the FGC-9 is also durable, none
| of that single-shot disposable .22 pistol stuff.
| imtringued wrote:
| The Halle shooter built his own weapons out of metal but
| he didn't have access to real ammunition. He couldn't
| forcibly open the gate to the synagogue with his guns.
| Gun control works just fine.
| XorNot wrote:
| No they're not.
|
| On an international scale guns aren't restricted at all in
| any practical sense.
|
| Nuclear weapons can have international conventions and
| treaties because they're difficult and obvious to build.
| Mass producing cheap drones and downloading an AI from the
| internet to run on a repurposed Android phone is not only
| normal, it's already happening _now_.
| vidarh wrote:
| You also don't need a proper gun. A gun is a big
| advantage if you can't safely get close enough to someone
| without them getting a chance to react.
|
| But if you can fly a drone or a number of drones up to
| someone too fast for them to react, there are any number
| of other ways to kill them with easily obtainable
| materials.
| pzo wrote:
| Totally agree. Each drone already has 4 sharp blades.
| Easy to replace them to be slightly bigger, sharper and
| from e.g. titanium instead of plastic and covering with
| poison/venom. Enough to slit someone throat/wrist and
| wait until bleed to death or detect someone eye and stab
| with nail.
| imtringued wrote:
| Wow, sharp blades now that sounds dangerous. If your
| drone is basically a flying lawnmower I can see how that
| will kill or heavily insure hundreds of people with a
| single drone.
|
| But that isn't very surprising though. An Apache
| helicopter can kill hundreds of people as well...
|
| What's surprising to me is that someone suggests that we
| do away with the toy drone swarm idea and to increase the
| capabilities of the drone without requiring an additional
| payload.
| normaler wrote:
| While reading the comments I shared most oft the dystopian
| visions of people being hunted down by scary drone swarms.
|
| But armor (especially armored vehicles) is still a thing and for
| something to be able to be fast and manouverable it also needs to
| be designed within size and weight constraints, which
| automatically limits possible payload and armor.
|
| So if there ia a technology to race around a forrest and
| autonomously find and engage slower targets, there must also
| exist the technology to engage flying objects with something like
| the Phalanx system, while not facing the same weight constraints
| as the moving attacker.
|
| It probably boils down to target saturation in symmetrical
| warfare and the end of assymetrical warfare fantasys akin to
| Wolverines.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| > there must also exist the technology to engage flying objects
|
| This is called a shotgun wielded by the best AI ever devised: a
| human.
|
| The Talibans proved that low tech isn't dead.
| exo762 wrote:
| Shooting down drones on-sight should become a societal norm.
| Using automated systems, which should be cheap and accessible
| to everyone.
| rpmisms wrote:
| That would require guns becoming a societal norm again, which
| would require personal responsibility and self-control
| becoming societal norms again.
| krapp wrote:
| >That would require guns becoming a societal norm again,
| which would require personal responsibility and self-
| control becoming societal norms again.
|
| As an American, I can guarantee you the latter is not
| required for the former.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I'm an American and radically pro-gun. I'm also radically
| pro-responsibility. If we want to renormalize firearm
| ownership (As in, you can mention it in Whole Foods
| without getting dirty looks), we need to reshape our
| culture of safety and ownership of our own actions.
| vidarh wrote:
| The challenge will be cost. If you hide your expensive
| slaughter bots in a swarm of cheap toys that only shares an
| outward appearance, your opponent need to take out all of your
| drones, while you only need to get lucky once.
|
| Couple that with good enough autonomous navigation and imagine
| an adversary suddenly releasing thousands of drones in between
| people and traffic in a city where they don't care about
| collateral damage, but you do.
| angelzen wrote:
| Armored vehicles are obsolete. See Azerbaidjan campaign in
| Nagorno Karabakh. More than 200 tanks & armored vehicles
| obliterated over a few weeks by drones raining hell from above.
| imtringued wrote:
| Obsolete against what? How do you occupy territory from the
| air?
| angelzen wrote:
| The assumption behind your question is that the victors
| somehow owe something to the defeated, akin to US
| occupation of Germany and Japan post WW2. US as a
| superpower is a huge outlier. Most of history developed
| along the lines of the Trail of Tears, if not downright
| Tamerlane.
|
| Use drones to create an air kill zone and keep the enemy
| military from stepping in said territory. Expel potentially
| hostile civilians. Reward your cousins with free land in
| the freshly depopulated lands.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-
| Karabakh_war#Retu...
| oxplot wrote:
| Keep in mind that Skydio currently manufactures and sells
| affordable drones ($1000 USD) that can fly autonomously through
| pretty much any environment, including forests.
|
| _Disclaimer: I don 't work for them nor affiliated - just been
| following their progress from a few years back and can't wait
| until they start selling to consumers in Australia._
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=skydio+2+forest
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQlyV0XqoSs
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| I watched the second video and was a bit disappointed. It lost
| him twice in 6 minutes even though he didn't leave its frame.
| Maybe version 3 will crack it
| edm0nd wrote:
| That is actually pretty impressive!
| l33tman wrote:
| "Our work replaces the traditional components of sensing,
| mapping, and planning with a single function that is represented
| by a neural network. This increases the system's robustness
| against sensor noise and reduces the processing latency."
|
| I get the feeling a bit that when they compared their depth pixel
| in => control out NN with the other two baseline algos , a lot of
| the difference is attributed to latency (one of the other algos
| did more temporal averaging explicitly for example). The depth
| input already provides a pretty good source of data for planning.
|
| The NN doesn't do anything you can't do already with the other
| algos, but it gets tuned automatically to a very good compromise
| between latency and performance, something that would be very
| tedious work for the designed algorithm systems and this is a
| strong point for building stuff like this as NNs.
|
| Article is at: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/Loquercio21_Science.pdf
| EastOfTruth wrote:
| We are getting closer to a slaughter bot that is actually usable:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
|
| my guess is that politicians will get scared when it becomes a
| reality
| beebeepka wrote:
| Impressive technology with all kinds of practical implications.
|
| On the other hand, I really don't these things in the woods for
| anything other than emergencies.
|
| We humans are noisy, and our toys are no small part of that.
| Guess that's what's growing old is like. Complaining about noise
| and other people
| asdff wrote:
| There have been animal species that have been disturbed by
| drone noise and its very sad.
| [deleted]
| system2 wrote:
| Potato quality video with creepy narrator. This could've been
| much better with better video quality and editing.
| pedro1976 wrote:
| This feeds into my dystopian believes. I a couple of years those
| drones will be affordable to every individual. This individual
| will then savely engage in a drone strike against other
| individuals. Hence I predict an end of the celebrity cult :)
| kypro wrote:
| You know, I'm honestly amazed we haven't seen any serious
| terror attacks use drones yet. I guess there is still a bit of
| a barrier in terms of cost and technical know-how for your
| average mass-murderer, but there are already drones which could
| do a huge amount of damage in an open space if equipped with
| the right weaponry.
| pedro1976 wrote:
| There are people [0] who claim that air traffic will be the
| first target of this development. It is very fragile, has a
| huge attack surface and efficient counter strategies are non
| existent. I am really amazed why "nothing" we know of has
| happened yet.
|
| [0] https://after-on.com/episodes-31-60/044
| efitz wrote:
| Until I watched the video, I was cracking up thinking about the
| training, imagining a forest full of trees with crashed drones at
| their bases.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| That was pretty much my first year flying FPV drones. Good
| thing I'm old enough to afford new parts.
| BasilPH wrote:
| Here's a [video](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/s02m1eqzdp6t5jk/AAAWm
| 4IBUn0zl0afB...).
| angelzen wrote:
| This is reminiscent of intense wingsuit videos. While the
| drones are small and the speeds are not quite there yet, being
| able to change course on a whim may prove sufficiently
| appealing. I wonder if zipping through obstacle areas could
| become a notable application area.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10byeZV5jcc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPIO4tdxYL0
| [deleted]
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| It isn't clear why it needed AI. If there is enough compute power
| to run a neural net, surely there is enough computer power to
| parse data from sonar or compute near-term avoidance vectors from
| bifocal imagery parallax/depth-queuing. Not clear how the AI
| obviates this.
| BrianHenryIE wrote:
| I think that's a question of "what is AI?"
|
| I understand this drone's obstacle avoidance as it sensing the
| terrain ahead, feeding it into a NN and deciding what the
| least-dangerous route to take is.
|
| No doubt that score can be calculated with an explicit
| algorithm that says "score a tree as -100 and an empty space as
| +10" etc.
|
| I liken it to a game developer designing an NPC's choice of
| path. Sure, Doom had enemies attacking you without neural
| networks, but maybe it's a better way to do it today.
|
| (this is all just my understanding rather than actually having
| worked on this)
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| The thing is, I've worked extensively with object detection
| and segmentation neural nets for the past three years: they
| would barf all over the place in this scenario. You can't
| train for enough of the types of terrain obstacles
| encountered in such a wide-open range of outdoor spaces, and
| you certainly couldn't do it fast enough with any degree of
| accuracy, even with a 3080 GPU, let alone an embedded Xavier-
| class NVidia module. A dinky int8 quantized "tree/no-tree"
| wouldn't stand a chance.
|
| This is why I asked for more details. They seem to indicate
| training, which today means neural net and not expert systems
| of yore. But that one be one hell of an object detector!! My
| question still stands.
| johnthewise wrote:
| Well, my understanding is that they are not training object
| detectors or segmentation models. They wouldn't be very
| useful anyway, you still need to have a 3d understanding of
| the scene and going from 2d->3d mapping wouldn't cut it.
| What they are doing instead is using stereo cameras, they
| are estimating the depth map of the field. Their model
| takes two rgb images, and produces a depth map. They
| combine this depth information with sensors on the drone
| such as acceleration etc and try to predict what an expert
| drone agent trained on perfect information in simulation
| would do. They train in simulation, restrict some of the
| information to the student agent and have it rely on only
| stereo cameras and sensors like in the world to mimic the
| 'privileged drone agent'. Computation wise, if you can run
| the depth estimation network on the hardware, remaining
| steps(given the depth map and sensor information, predict
| privileged drone agent path/vector), should be trivial and
| most likely are shallow networks.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| It's not about AI. They trained a neural net to approximate an
| offline calculation that required more time and processing
| power than what's available on a drone, then they used the
| trained neural net to navigate the drone by trying to predict
| the approximated calculation. Thus, saving on time and
| processing power and allow the neural net to pilot the drone at
| the vertiginous speeds of 40 km/h :P
|
| (but through trees and all)
|
| The article calls the algorithm that performed the offline
| calculation a "simulated expert", probably because it operated
| in a simulation. My guess is it was a classical planner.
| Planning works very well but it can be slow and deliberate
| because it usually has to solve some kind of NP-complete SAT
| problem and so on. By approximating it with a neural net they
| avoid the time-consuming, intractable calculation. The question
| is how broadly it can generalise.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Ah. I see. It's using a neural net in the sense that it is
| literally a "generic function approximation" to make
| decisions on pathfinding based on depth maps (see
| 'johnthewise' response below). That's interesting: it
| foregoes the complex pathfinding algorithm for a trained
| "guess" based on how expert drone pilots handle the same
| stereoscopic depth map.
|
| Fascinating!
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