[HN Gopher] Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing f...
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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
Author : picture
Score : 96 points
Date : 2025-06-04 20:03 UTC (2 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.tudelft.nl)
| xnx wrote:
| Bright futures for these engineers in the defense industry.
| cluckindan wrote:
| The same cannot be said about whoever runs the site.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| bright futures in the darkest places.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+
| years of real active war between two technologically advanced
| nations.
| Swoerd wrote:
| -That you know of.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad
| jandrese wrote:
| There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is
| only lagging behind slightly.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 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.
| dji4321234 wrote:
| 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.
| switchbak wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Fantastic book, highly recommended.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| jolt42 wrote:
| why? if nuclear weapons got the green light, do you expect a
| different outcome?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Because nuclear weapons got the green light.
| switchbak wrote:
| 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.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| 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.
| bamboozled wrote:
| A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing
| outside and have little chance of getting caught, for
| example.
|
| Nice.
| trhway wrote:
| 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| yeesh. i made this comparison once and HN told me that campy
| action movies are bad to base policy on :\
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| 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
| belter wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/dr...
| trhway wrote:
| >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.)
| impossiblefork wrote:
| >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.
| atonse wrote:
| 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.
| jmccarthy wrote:
| very prompt burrito delivery?
| generalizations wrote:
| In china probably very soon. In the US? Regulation has
| already killed that.
| cluckindan wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| Christ, you sound like my nutritionist.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Inspecting utilities and other industrial infrastructure.
| lbotos wrote:
| 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.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Drones flying through your windows to deliver things faster.
|
| Cons: massive invasion of privacy and probably illegal.
|
| Pros: looks cool.
| itishappy wrote:
| I've always thought a user-installable drone-pad in the style
| of a window AC unit would be the ideal.
| AngryData wrote:
| 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.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| 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.
| siavosh wrote:
| 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?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The only question is whether motors or propellers will be
| banned for private sale first. (After drones themselves, of
| course.)
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I kind of prefer this, even without bombs i dont want
| unregulated idiots dropping a drone on my head in an urban
| space.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| That's OK. There's probably something you like that I'd
| like to ban, too.
| siavosh wrote:
| 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..
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| yunwal wrote:
| Waymo is not anonymous
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| burningChrome wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| itishappy wrote:
| This is that. This race used only a single forward-facing
| camera and IMU fed to an onboard Orin NX.
| IshKebab wrote:
| So is the processing happening on the drone? Presumably not...
| itishappy wrote:
| Entirely, as is sensing.
| ilikeatari wrote:
| Looks like it had NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB. No GPS, Lidar,
| motion capture so its vision only. 6s battery so 5 incher?
| airstrike wrote:
| Interestingly, the URL for the embedded youtube video ends with
| the word "FATE"...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
| rossant wrote:
| Gives me the idea for a silly game: finding YouTube videos with
| words in their identifiers that are relevant to the content.
| rvz wrote:
| Meanwhile, many defense companies are quietly watching this
| racing achievement far far away through their palantiri orb
| researching who built that autonomous drone.
| bri3d wrote:
| 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.
| generalizations wrote:
| 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.
| bri3d wrote:
| 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.
| koolala wrote:
| This is crazy, its dexterity and range of motion could
| potentially exceed all human modeled systems.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| 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?
| itishappy wrote:
| 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...
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| zellyn wrote:
| 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
| 77pt77 wrote:
| https://archive.is/wip/H3AAn
|
| Since I can't access.
| sveinatle wrote:
| 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...
| leeoniya wrote:
| 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?
| itishappy wrote:
| They had no prior knowledge of the course.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| ...why are we training skynet again?
| bamboozled wrote:
| because there is money in it ?
| snewman wrote:
| 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).
| itishappy wrote:
| 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
| bri3d wrote:
| 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.
| Quitschquat wrote:
| The drone has a camera and a IMU while the human has only the
| camera. How big is the advantage there?
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.
| koolala wrote:
| This feels like a bigger deal than what Carmack is doing with an
| Atari controller robot.
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