[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 : 295 points
Date : 2025-06-04 20:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tudelft.nl)
(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.
| jryle70 wrote:
| Tell that to the Ukrainians who fight the brutal war Russia
| are waging:
|
| https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-commanders-
| exclu...
| 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.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Please read before responding.
| 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.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone
| who served in russian/soviet army.
|
| > Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily
| programmed
|
| Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put
| waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass
| adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones,
| overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with
| regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware
| that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom
| frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
| pjc50 wrote:
| > The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone
| who served in russian/soviet army.
|
| Why is this, for the rest of us?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this
| source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-
| covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > there's still no mass adoption of target locking or
| self-aiming drones
|
| As long as you define 'drone' as a tiny quadrotor.
| Missiles like Sidewinder and Hellfire, cruise missiles
| like Tomahwak, fire-and-forget MANPADs, GPS-guided
| gravity bombs, even ICBMs with MIRV warheads. All
| autonomously travel to their target and destroy it.
|
| There are even some loitering anti-tank missiles that
| climb up above the launching aircraft and sit on a
| parachute for a while until they see a tank to destroy.
| The pilot never has to see the tank.
|
| All autonomous and adopted.
|
| The main novelty in the electric drone tech is very very
| low cost.
| htrp wrote:
| If you can get a GPS fix (or a lat long to start), you can
| run an INS just as easily.
| 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.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| You have no idea what you're talking about and your video
| is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of
| footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all
| old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
| dji4321234 wrote:
| https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563
|
| Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking
| about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing
| these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-
| on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on
| the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters
| the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it
| is still a hit.
|
| These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little
| easier to get than it used to be but they are still in
| wide use.
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is
| extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone
| says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws
| a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight
| time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million
| a piece.
|
| But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all
| future adversaries!"
|
| Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the
| drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this
| will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi
| month infiltration and espionage operation which got those
| systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to
| almost the fence line).
| switchbak wrote:
| "when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these
| people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make
| it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking
| about, and use different terms to describe things at
| different levels of specificity.
|
| Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's
| and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare"
| predates the common application to quadcopters, people
| were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early
| 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is
| annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people
| are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
| geysersam wrote:
| As if the US can compete with china on drone numbers or
| quality. If drones are the future of war, China will have
| an enormous advantage in a future war. Let's hope it never
| comes to that.
| switchbak wrote:
| Agree 100%, it's a funny strategy but also shows how weak
| the US hand is - China can pump out extraordinary numbers
| of these things, and they have pretty incredible tech
| talent. I wish I didn't live in such interesting times.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Dude, it's not a prediction, it's what is currently
| happening. If you follow active drone units (from both
| sides) you'll see that they're all controlled by operators
| until the last frame.
|
| These bombers attacks were done with manual control too.
| These drones had LTE modems and on footage it's clearly
| visible that they controlled by operator.
|
| People can't read these days, especially if it doesn't
| match the reality they build in their heads.
| switchbak wrote:
| Oh I see - emphasis on the 'autonomous' part, yeah I
| would agree on that for today. Things are pretty immature
| on the autonomous side right now, but that will
| definitely change ... it's still the military, so it'll
| take a while, but they'll do it when they're forced to.
|
| I'll skip the shitty retort about not reading.
| arcticfox wrote:
| Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of
| drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now
| the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting
| and fiberoptic threads.
| baq wrote:
| The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field
| of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace
| time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war
| it's coming at you at 50mph and you can't do anything to
| stop it.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units
| adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases
| when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all
| use regular FPV and FO drones.
|
| Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the
| only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which
| means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it
| changing.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| An interesting paper just published about the current state
| of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1].
|
| "Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are
| premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and
| Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing,
| and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en
| masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML
| and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI
| capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the
| issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that
| will require additional time and resources to facilitate.
| Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to
| carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking
| certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft,
| before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML
| drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the
| mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because
| the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current
| battlefield conditions at the current state of technology."
|
| [1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-
| rev...
| numpad0 wrote:
| Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare
| tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-
| escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money
| spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the
| long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to
| technology applied to military domain feels weird.
| 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.
| Taek wrote:
| I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little
| more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of
| the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it
| portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Interesting! I found it to be almost too optimistic or
| unbelievably hopeful.
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| Same here. I think I hadn't ever felt so hopeful for the
| future as I was while reading that book. I doubt that our
| world will turn out so positive.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It will likely come out somewhere in between our fears
| and our hopes. So it's good that we double down on
| imagining hopeful scenarios. Makes it easier to realize
| them.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| Not so sure. Russia arranged a lot of "worst case
| scenarios" for all of us. It will take a lot of effort to
| get to "okay" again.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| Kim Stanley Robinson's books are all like that - a
| near/mid term crisis you can easily relate with, often
| caused by climate change, that eventually people rise up
| to kinda resolve, putting it on a hopeful trajectory.
| Lots of expressing of human best qualities along the way.
| Similar to the Culture in this.
| 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.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Weapon that threatens everyone is better than weapon that
| threatens only some
| 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.
| bravoetch wrote:
| Yes, and so far it's much easier to drive a van into a
| crowd of people. Nobody has tried to mandate tech in cars
| that detects and prevents such malicious behavior.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Can you drive a van into a group of people without even
| being physically present though ?
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Yes. https://www.psu.edu/news/campus-life/story/hackers-
| who-remot...
|
| Even without vulnerabilities like that, something like
| https://comma.ai/openpilot could very likely be used in
| the same way ArduPilot was used in the recent Ukrainian
| drone attacks.
| lazide wrote:
| easier than a drone, technically. using the same tools
| and techniques too.
|
| a van is just a bigger, more inherently stable drone.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Vehicles are registered and licensed to tie them to
| specific owners. You are required to provide a
| identification/drivers license when renting a vehicle.
| The largest, most dangerous vehicles like semi-trucks
| have additional restrictions on licensing and access.
| There is a pretty robust system in place to reduce
| unattributable crimes using vehicles.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I mean... yeah, that's a definite possibility. If a
| lunatic has access to explosives, there's an infinite
| number of ways they could do that.
|
| The hard part is that there is no effective way to
| regulate anything in the supply chain involved except for
| the explosives themselves. Everything else is super
| commoditized at this point and, other than the props,
| very multi-purpose. The first significant hexcopter I
| built used a BeagleBone Blue for processing, generic ESCs
| and BLDCs for the motors, and an aluminum frame that I
| cut out of aluminum tubes from Home Depot. Max takeoff
| weight was 55lb, because that's the heaviest it could
| legally take off with. This was 7 years ago.
| lazide wrote:
| If one is a lunatic, there are easy to find recipes for
| making bulk (albeit dangerous to be around) explosives.
|
| one thing in societies favor though - sufficiently
| unstable lunatics tend to self delete themselves in
| various ways by being unstable lunatics. few tend to be
| in the "sweet" spot of dangerous lunatics who are stable
| and focused enough to follow through successfully with a
| dangerous plan. thankfully.
|
| For example - most people who could synthesize multi-kilo
| quantities of TATP without blowing themselves up and
| successfully build a DIY drone to carry it have better
| and more productive things to do with their lives. at
| least in the west.
| optomas wrote:
| Generally, if you are smart enough to fashion this
| without being caught, you are too smart to do something
| like that.
|
| Plus, you got a cool and potentially lucrative hobby,
| designing exterminator machines. Why bother with children
| at that point?
|
| There are much, much better targets to be had.
|
| Your point on the dwindling barrier to implementation
| stands.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's the barrier to implementation that I find concerning
| and the lack of defensive innovation just as much of a
| concern.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > Why bother with children at that point?
|
| the premise is that the person doing it is very mentally
| ill. the question, "why would they do that when they
| could do something else that makes more sense?", doesn't
| make a lot of sense itself under the premise.
| yaris wrote:
| If a person is very ill mentally then there are already
| many ways to kill people in numbers, some of which ways
| are much more accessible than slaughterbots.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| "Most people don't want to murder innocents" isn't
| reassuring. It only takes one lunatic. And there's a lot
| of lunatics out there.
| tremon wrote:
| Then the proper solution is to create fewer lunatics:
| provide better mental health support, good social safety
| nets, and a more egalitarian society.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children
| playing outside and have little chance of getting caught,
| for example.
|
| America insists on making sure that guns are universally
| available so that school shootings can still happen.
| Doesn't register. The death toll seems to be politically
| acceptable.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That's why only the strong communities with strong
| families will survive, because even lunatics are cared
| for in strong community structures.
| 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.
| aorloff wrote:
| I guess it falls on me to break it to you then but serious
| "global talks" happen at the exploding end of ordinance.
|
| There is no Jedi Council to appeal to, no wise group of non-
| aggressive nations gathering to pacify the troublemakers.
| 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.) It is basically a very
| typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal
| scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the
| one to be made battlefield-relevant.
|
| And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that
| example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's
| behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine
| will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from
| Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their
| victory.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| No.
|
| Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service
| we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no
| military class that if they decide to can take over. We
| knew the cost, and the cost is worth it.
|
| In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory
| military service.
|
| This protects against coups, ensures your power in
| society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc.
| from taking over.
| trhway wrote:
| Man, with all the respect to Sweden, you're in your own
| [very high] class.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I feel we're behind the Swiss, and want to imitate them.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing
| their national service, and the career soldiers (who are
| the people likely to start a coup)?
|
| In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-
| connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the
| whole military. By the time the whole military (or
| country) realises what's happened, it's already happened
| and there's not a lot they can do.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| The career soldiers are recruited from people doing their
| mandatory military service, and upon this, many people
| having done their mandatory military service are part of
| the home defence and practice now and then.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> This protects against coups, ensures your power in
| society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc.
| from taking over._
|
| Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0]
| while mandatory military service was still in place [1].
| The conscripts did not play a role in protecting
| democracy.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| There are no silver bullets. It's just that having
| (solely) an elite warrior class is an extra risk.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Decision-making in the armed forces is _always_ performed
| by a "warrior class". The people who operate heavy war
| machinery are also career soldiers; conscripts are light
| infantry.
|
| And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory
| military service. It only makes sense in the context of a
| small country (in terms of population) bordering a large
| aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly)
| Canada.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| No, conscripts operate also tanks and artillery. They
| also load and prepare combat aircraft.
|
| Artillery and tanks will have some kind of professional
| officer though.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Armed forces culture is also incredibly important.
| Goal/mission oriented organizations are harder to co-opt
| than top-down command structure organizations.
| graemep wrote:
| This is similar to the argument behind the American
| constitutional right to own guns.
|
| In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the
| training, organisation and weaponry of the professional
| military will be able to beat them in contemporary
| circumstances.
|
| I realise military service means people have some
| training, but as much as the professionals? What about
| air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about
| timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can
| react.
|
| Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?
| impossiblefork wrote:
| The people doing the mandatory military service is the
| army. There is no army without the mass army.
|
| They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use
| artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger
| troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily
| people who stay for longer than their military service.
| tryauuum wrote:
| Maybe it's unrelated to the thread topic, but the benefit
| of the American 2 amendment system is that the
| conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face
| when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript. Maybe
| this would have prevented the war with Ukraine
| graemep wrote:
| It did not historically stop conscription in the US
| though, so I do not think it would do so anywhere else.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text)
| to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a
| militia to mobilize against internal and external
| security threats, not to _deny_ the state the ability to
| do so and force it rely on professional forces.
|
| Large, permanent, professional internal and external
| security forces were not something the framers of the
| Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as
| much as anything, a way to _reduce_ the temptation to
| rely on those _instead of_ summoning a posse (for law
| enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary),
| rather than a way to prevent conscription.
|
| They ultimately failed at that, too, though.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the
| face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript
|
| Generally such conscripts realize they're dooming their
| family to at best prison and at worst dying in the raid
| on their home.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| An insurgency doesn't report to a battlefield to be
| slaughtered by the professional army. To see what a
| large-scale American resistance would look like, Vietnam,
| Iraq, or Afghanistan are instructive.
| Gud wrote:
| I did my conscription service in 2005-2006(iirc), plus
| one tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan.
|
| This is the first I hear that this would be the
| motivation.
|
| The main motivation is that for a small country like
| Sweden to have enough manpower to defend itself
| adequately, conscription is necessary.
| somenameforme wrote:
| In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle
| for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's
| morale breaking, not by literally running out of
| soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're
| losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for),
| most people would prefer to save their own lives rather
| than die for nothing.
|
| So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender,
| and so on. This results in the losing state having to
| resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as
| literally dragging people in off the street, making it
| illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave
| the country, expanding the age range for conscription,
| and so on.
|
| That all results in even worse morale which makes your
| fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can
| motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources
| on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but
| ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at
| some point it all just collapses like a house of cards.
|
| ---
|
| And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a
| perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who
| has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks
| first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is
| essentially the strongest military nation in the world.
| They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of
| being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure
| of military strength - except for morale. Those guys'
| spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for
| decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no
| relenting.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is
| essentially the strongest military nation in the world.
| They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of
| being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure
| of military strength - except for morale.
|
| The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't
| do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two
| years and provide education abilities for women
| afterwards. But in order to actually achieve change, you
| have to invest _significantly_ more resources to actually
| build the foundations for a viable society: democracy,
| rule of law and an economic perspective for the populace.
|
| In Germany, the Allied Forces stayed for about 45 years,
| two generations worth of time. Just think of the massive
| amount of money and resources invested... the first years
| were taken similarly to Afghanistan - depose the Hxtler
| regime and rebuild a rule of law afterwards and, as in
| the Luftbrucke, ensure basic survival. But then, they
| stayed in for over three decades to make sure that a
| healthy democracy would not just form but also establish
| and entrench itself against threats, and that Germany had
| an industrial base which was used to provide employment
| and income for the populace. Also, thank God for the
| Americans deciding not to follow the "Morgenthau plan"
| that proposed turning Germany into a purely agrarian
| state with no industrial capability ever again - that
| would have caused us to follow down the Afghanistan path
| with utter certainty.
|
| In Afghanistan however, the situation after the immediate
| war and short post-war period was markedly different. The
| troops were locked up in their bases outside of bombing
| jihadists, which meant that local warlords had little to
| no oversight in their atrocities and stuff like "bacha
| bazi" (organized child sexual abuse) and slavery went on
| with effective impunity. The local puppet government
| barely had any income sources other than foreign aid (and
| selling opium on the black market) which meant there was
| no way to form a national identity and storytelling or
| even a common purpose, and a lack of oversight of the
| occupying forces over the puppet government led to
| widespread corruption and looting of the external
| investments, which led to it losing support across the
| country. And on top of that, we didn't even do decent
| oversight over our own troops. Abu Ghuraib is far from
| the only scandal that was barely prosecuted, not to
| mention all the other shit that was quietly swept under
| the rug - that led to the populace despising our troops
| even more.
|
| We didn't lose Afghanistan because the Taliban are a
| strong army - they were and are not, just look at the
| videos from right after the takeover. We lost Afghanistan
| because we didn't give anyone in the wide population a
| reason to fight for themselves and not just submit to the
| next best warlord.
| somenameforme wrote:
| A war doesn't end when a government is deposed, it ends
| when resistance ceases (which is generally because morale
| breaks). Up until, and including, the final day of US
| withdrawal in Afghanistan the Taliban were fiercely
| resisting. US troops rarely left their little green zones
| because they would have been killed, same as in Iraq. The
| media stopped meaningful coverage of the war relatively
| quickly, which I think led people to believe that
| meaningful resistance wrapped up relatively quickly, but
| that's not the case at all. The Taliban ended up
| _killing_ at least 75,000 soldiers /security forces and
| wounding what was likely some large multiple of that.
|
| All of the things you're discussing are not things that
| the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were
| ultimately powerless to do so. Americans would never
| tolerate US soldiers dying by the tens to hundreds of
| thousands as would have happened if we actually tried to
| enforce order on foot. So we were left with proxy
| soldiers, contractors, and a money printing machine. But
| that simply wasn't enough to defeat the Taliban, let
| alone carry out the grand changes you mention.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > All of the things you're discussing are not things that
| the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were
| ultimately powerless to do so.
|
| I disagree with this assessment.
|
| Had the Western forces provided actual, _proven_ economic
| opportunities for the people, the supply of "resistance"
| fighters would have dwindled. People don't become
| terrorists or insurgents just because, they follow that
| path because they do not see a gainful alternative to
| this life. (Side note, we're seeing this also in
| Palestine where Hamas and Fatah both draw a steady supply
| of recruits from the desperate)
|
| Afghanistan has untold billions of dollars worth of all
| kinds of natural resources [1]. But no attempt was made,
| not even on paper, to exploit these natural resources.
| IMHO, even a single pilot project would have been a good
| start - a mine that pays a decent amount of money to the
| workers and the profits going to the national government
| as well as local authorities. Basically, show to the wide
| population that something good came around from all the
| suffering in the end, provide an alternative from the
| Taliban propaganda that at least promised salvation in
| the afterlife for killing infidels.
|
| But no, we ignored this opportunity, which meant that
| other than "women can go to schools" we did not have any
| talking points available to counter the Taliban
| propaganda of "they're killing us with impunity and the
| puppet government is looting". That is how we truly lost,
| and what China and a bunch of oil sheiks will now enjoy.
|
| [1] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/why-is-
| afghanistan-par...
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| There is no Afghanistan . There is a area, with tribes,
| in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal
| famuly clans governed by warlords. "Afghanistan"
| hallucinated by the us, as a state does not exist and
| never has.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval
| villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed
| by warlords.
|
| Germany used to be the same until 1871, a loose
| federation of fiefdoms that regularly went to war amongst
| each other. Fun fact, the tariff region structure [1]
| very much resembles a map from what was "Germany" before
| then [2].
|
| It's not impossible to turn a bunch of small fiefdoms
| into one powerful entity. All you need is a compelling
| story and, as I wrote in this thread, some sort of
| economic incentive/perspective that actually shows to the
| population that the new government is actually better for
| their individual lives than what was before.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/c18q0r/das_heili
| ge_tari...
|
| [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Heiliges_R%C3%B6m
| isches_...
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Well congrats they got that story, they repelled in
| order: the mongols, the greek, the chinese, the russians,
| the british, the russians, the americans and soon the
| chinese. Are they the swiss yet ? Some ingredient is
| missing , the story aint it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Up until the Soviet era, a lot of the natural resources
| Afghanistan has simply were not relevant, or maybe that
| fits it better, there were easier ways to acquire them
| than a country thousands of road (!) miles away from the
| powers that were.
|
| The Soviets wanted Afghanistan for imperialist reasons,
| during the first Taliban era there were enough other
| sources that were more convenient, the Americans lacked
| the conviction and coherence to follow through... and now
| the Chinese are swooping in with money.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Many factors contributed to Germany losing WWII, but one
| of them _was_ because they ran out of soldiers. They were
| down to using boys and old men.
| krisoft wrote:
| > It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're
| the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
|
| Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes
| coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not
| participate in any way.
|
| Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on
| war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots"
| on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV.
| Which result in people not voting for you come next
| election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground
| anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer
| humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more
| war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places.
|
| That's the problem. First order effect is of course good
| for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield
| to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm
| worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot
| more wars and battlefields in a less stable world.
|
| And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to
| fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough,
| and hard to "control" enough that it is available for
| organised crime you might see it used in assassinations,
| gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all
| will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the
| people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their
| target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects
| are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions
| they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of
| autonomous drones.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Don't we already have this in the form of the state?
| gattr wrote:
| I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to
| this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie
| "Robot Jox".
| pjc50 wrote:
| +1 for mentioning that movie; I watched it a month ago and
| it's hilarious. Nearest I've seen to live action with giant
| robot anime sensibilities.
| paganel wrote:
| > And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good
| thing.
|
| I agree with your other points, but this only helps with
| (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the
| current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact
| that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of
| 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part
| of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.
|
| Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big
| power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost
| everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot
| to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the
| number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of
| war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so
| soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good
| thing.
|
| Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further
| the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield",
| putting _everyone_ on it.
|
| They _can_ , depending on how they are employed, reduce the
| casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of
| a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's
| recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they
| can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military
| impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones
| directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what
| that could look like.)
| cess11 wrote:
| "And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good
| thing."
|
| You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for
| "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future
| battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now,
| terrorists.
| allturtles wrote:
| "What hope can there be for mankind," I thought, "when there
| are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-
| nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women
| are?"
|
| And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had
| read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is
| entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth,
| Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
|
| It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists
| of one word and a period.
|
| This is it:
|
| "Nothing."
|
| --Kurt Vonnegut, _Cat 's Cradle_
| fsloth wrote:
| Vonnegut's bleakness is not theoretical which gives it a
| specific bite. As POV Vonnegut cleaned up the shriveled
| remains of civilian victims of firebombing.
| energy123 wrote:
| All hard countered by a laser like the Iron Beam, no? Unless
| there's a hard counter to the hard counter?
| worldsayshi wrote:
| The obvious counter to a laser could be 'more drones'? And
| maybe just have the drones sneak up close to the ground.
| lolc wrote:
| I always hear this sneak up thing and think about how birds
| can be caught with netting. And all the barbed wire in old
| battlefields. I don't think drones will be able to
| meaningfully sneak up to a laser.
|
| Of course more drones works. But more drones here is less
| drones there. It means lasers are an effective deterrent
| against opportunistic attacks.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Both Russia and Ukraine are putting up netting around the
| roads near the frontlines. Wire-guided drones are able to
| fly close enough to the ground to avoid it.
| lazide wrote:
| a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3
| ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph?
| not an easy situation.
|
| ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second?
| maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target
| discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap
| and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And ultimately there's the cost factor. Drones can be mass
| produced for cheap, laser systems are specialized and
| expensive. Something I haven't seen yet (but is likely in
| development) is drone swarms, one operator directing a
| squad of a hundred drones like it's an RTS game. Only one
| grenade or kamikaze drone needs to detonate close enough to
| a laser system to take it out of action. Mind you, the
| system has a range of up to 10 kilometers, so if the drones
| are detected from that far out there's enough time to take
| them all out.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Here's a DARPA project from a few years back that is
| exactly having a small number of operators for a large
| number of drones. Very real.
|
| https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/offensive-swarm-
| enab...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, an artillery strike, a smoke screen, or fog. I'm also
| reading the target needs to be stationary or its movements
| predictable; unpredictable evasive maneuvers should be easy
| enough to implement (at the cost of speed/range). Plus
| there's the cost of the device itself, while it says it costs
| $3 per shot, it's still an (up to) 100 kw device + sensors +
| power supply setup. It doesn't say how much the system itself
| costs or its maintenance.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Or attack while it rains. Sure, a laser is great for
| defending Southern California or a place in the Middle
| East, but not so great for defending Great Britain
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Rain probably adds a fair degree of difficulty for the
| drones themselves, though?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| The problem is the asymmetry. Drones are cheap, can be
| produced in huge numbers, and can be deployed anywhere by
| anyone. You can't put laser defences on every target, and the
| best laser defence could still be overwhelmed by a sufficient
| number of drones.
|
| I am fucking terrified of drones.
| asdff wrote:
| Drones still have the limiting factor that is that they
| need to be produced at all as a piece of technology.
| Artillery shell on the other hand has all the explosive
| bits needed to make that drone blow up half your house,
| only it is a dummy round being fired from technology that
| has been globally solved and replicated for what over 100
| years now, with huge stocks of surplus available along with
| popular rudimentary designs used by various guerillas
| around the world.
|
| Increasingly we are also seeing a world where the
| technology to shape a cultures mind share can be deployed
| with a few dozen lines of code and a malware bot net rather
| than a sophisticated and well funded mass media operation a
| la the 1960s western cultural revolution supported in part
| by the CIA. You don't even need to blow up the enemies
| country, you can convince them it is in their best interest
| to be subjugated and they will remove their own naysayer
| internally and roll out the carpet for you when you arrive
| and proclaim your regional Obergruppenfuhrer to meet
| production quotas.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Combined arms is the probable solution for a Ukraine type
| war. As soon as your expensive laser lights up, it's got a
| couple of minutes to move before artillery shells arrive.
|
| Of course deeper into Russia that's safe .. but instead you
| have the problem of a huge area to cover. You can protect a
| few high value targets but not everywhere. Consider something
| like the early stages of the Iraq war: target every single
| civilian electrical substation and petrol station with a
| drone bombing.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| 47 second is the best artillery response I've seen in
| Russia Ukraine war.
| randomtoast wrote:
| And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of
| them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia.
| It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these
| flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-
| scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and
| aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone
| battlefields.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Missed that news; https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-
| defense/britain-p...
|
| I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare.
| Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty
| substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like
| Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval
| warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one.
|
| Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. They were the
| first to deploy the fiber-optic cable drones as an anti-ECM
| measure. And of course both sides are ordering parts from
| China.
| IshKebab wrote:
| $4k per drone... ouch.
| pjc50 wrote:
| A lot of money if you're a UK benefits recipient, not a
| lot of money for a piece of military equipment. Slightly
| more than the annual allowance of one asylum seeker.
|
| Whole program is about a third of the cost of a Type 26
| Frigate.
| gusfoo wrote:
| The UK has also released some details of a new 'in bulk' RF-
| based drone takedown DEW.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vY5efYXMQ
| greenavocado wrote:
| Let's review what Uncle Ted had to say about this.
|
| See paragraph 87 by searching for "THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS"
|
| https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/IndustrialSocietyAnd...
| cess11 wrote:
| The conclusion is succinct and the stuff leading up to it of
| dubious quality.
|
| "92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the
| real welfare of the human race or to any other standard,
| obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists
| and of the government officials and corporation executives
| who provide the funds for research."
| 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.
| martin_a wrote:
| Fire departments and police in Germany are deploying more and
| more drone units, too.
|
| Firefighters use them to search for missing persons but also
| to get aerial images and a better overview of larger scenes
| as "running around" is often not possible or doesn't help
| that much with the overview.
|
| Police is using them to take pictures of accidents. It's
| easier to see tire marks and the whole "history" of an
| accident from above. Really reduces their time on a scenery
| to take pictures of everything.
| 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.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Didn't they try this in Ukraine and it doesn't work? Any
| point installation is quickly overwhelmed. The only answer
| to FPV drones so far seems to be more FPV drones. Though
| they're not using fully-autonomous drones in Ukraine yet,
| so that might still play out.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| "[As of May 2025] Ukraine has developed and successfully
| tested the Sky Sentinel - an AI-powered, fully automated
| turret designed to shoot down Russian drones and
| missiles... the M2 is known to have an effective range of
| 1.5 kilometers against airborne threats. Each unit costs
| approximately $150,000. Developers estimate that
| protecting a city would require 10 to 30 turrets... Given
| that each Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone used by Russia
| costs around $100,000, Sky Sentinel offers a scalable and
| cost-effective solution to a persistent and deadly
| threat."
|
| https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/53546
| amoshebb wrote:
| This doesn't address "Quickly overwhelmed".
|
| Yes, a wall of $150,000 bushmasters with some servos can
| take hurl enough lead in the air to protect a city from a
| single gulf-war era $100,000 lawnmower engine on two
| meter wings bumbling in a straight line at jogging pace.
|
| We're currently in the "a shipping container on a semi
| can could launch dozens of $2000 racing quads with
| molotov cocktails zip-tied to the bottom with enough
| agility to thread a needle faster than a turret can swing
| its own mass"
|
| And the writing is on the wall for some near-future "any
| nation state could drop sci-fi cluster bombs that shed
| ten-thousand 250gram racing quads that can overwhelm even
| the most advanced point defence just by numbers and it'll
| be cheaper than a conventional 2000lb bomb"
| pjc50 wrote:
| > A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a
| few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast.
|
| I'm having a hard time believing this is effective.
|
| > The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the
| collateral damage
|
| Russians don't care about collateral damage and there doesn't
| seem to be any evidence of them using such weapons?
| contravariant wrote:
| Sure, just strap a nuke to it and watch WWIII kick off. No
| terminator necessary.
| MoonGhost wrote:
| This will definitely be used in drone vs drone dogfight.
| Interceptors hunting spy, bombers, and kamikaze drones.
| energy123 wrote:
| Paul Christiano has thought about these scenarios. I recommend
| his interview with Dwarkesh a while ago where he goes in depth
| about it.
| 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?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ironically the hard part of that is still more "suitcase
| nuke" than "last mile delivery".
|
| I'm mildly suprised that the US hasn't seen a breakout of
| car bombs since Oklahoma City or WTC. It seems that the
| tradition force of using guns for the frequent mass
| casualty suicide terrorism events is too strong.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Guns are easy to get, they're portable, they're easy to
| use, and they are stable and safe to operate. Bombs are
| pretty much none of those things. Bombs are not sold at
| your local Walmart or sporting goods store, they don have
| weekend bomb shows at your local convention centers, they
| require some skill to make, the raw ingredients are
| tracked at point of sale, and to have the same casualty
| count tends to require a large amount. It doesn't take
| much reasoning to understand why guns are the goto choice
| 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.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| >>Just wait until these things can move through space with
| physical/gyro sensors on their own,
|
| and better guidance software. Yeah, there's a lot of room for
| improvement
|
| "Traditional waypoint navigation assumes movement through a
| series of Cartesian positions. But in pursuit dynamics, for
| example, what matters is directional alignment over time"
|
| https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep/blob/main/docs/01-ratio.
| ..
| 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?
| ilikeatari wrote:
| Does anyone know the FC or AIO they are flying?
| 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.
| sorenjan wrote:
| They reference ESA's research in "Guidance and Control
| Nets", and when looking at ESA's page for their "Advanced
| Concepts Team" [0] they in turn reference ETH Zurich's
| research in RL for drone control. Specifically [1] this
| paper from 2023: "Champion-level drone racing using deep
| reinforcement learning" [2]. They use a 2x128 MLP for the
| control policy.
|
| [0] https://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/
|
| [1] https://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/projects/rl_vs_imitation_le
| arnin...
|
| [2] https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/257405/
| 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?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Reports downthread suggest that the NN is running directly
| on the drone, in the form of a Jetson. Which would give
| much better latency and quality of video.
| 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.
| david-gpu wrote:
| We all understand that. People are simply observing that
| there an obvious path from this technology demonstrator to
| something similar in the battlefield.
| tekla wrote:
| You mean the stuff that anyone knew was possible 10 years
| ago, but was waiting for the tech to become much cheaper?
| tough wrote:
| Yeah, now its just cheaper enough so its happening
| close04 wrote:
| > which have a payload and sometimes a fiber optic cable
|
| The optic cable is for the human pilot. An AI piloted drone
| doesn't need it.
| closewith wrote:
| Although even autonomous combat/ISTAR drones may require
| fibre spools for BDA, ISTAR, etc.
| akie wrote:
| If we are ok with AI drones autonomously choosing bombing
| targets, then you're right.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think Ukraine would be ok with AI drones launched next
| to a Russian airfield autonomously choosing targets...
|
| I expect Russia will be ok with it in any situation.
| pacetest wrote:
| It used a small RL trained network running on the flight
| controllers MCU directly that controlled the motors given state
| (position, orientation ...) inputs. The Jetson handled vision
| processing.
| wepple wrote:
| > The spec DCL drone isn't very capable compared to the more
| open-specification drones in racing leagues like MultiGP
|
| Yeah, I'm sure this is a great milestone but it isn't notable
| until AI is beating MCK[1] who would be the "Lee Sodol of FPV"
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/fmc1URVdyUs?si=jPPx5sHjU_ZDOghF
| durandal1 wrote:
| Also, this track looks nothing like a competitive drone race
| track, the obstacles are easier and it seems designed to cater
| to the autonomous drones.
| bri3d wrote:
| It's DCL, they're all kind of poor like this IMO. Certainly
| nothing like MultiGP
| 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...
| pacetest wrote:
| It's fundamentally different, it's using an RL trained network
| that gets the drone state (position, orientation, velocity) as
| input and directly outputs motor commands.
| 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.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I don't think so. The article says the race track was
| controlled by the race organisers but not that it wasn't
| known to the participants before the race.
|
| Anyway given the state of the art, flying autonomously at
| great speeds and beating human champions without pre-
| training, i.e. on an unknown race track, would be a much
| bigger breakthrough than just beating some human champions
| (which has already happened except in a less official
| environment). You can rest assured that if that was what the
| team achieved, the article would be telling us all about it.
| itishappy wrote:
| Shoot, you're totally right. They had no prior knowledge
| _before the event_ , but I don't know how they teach it the
| course. There's more than one gate visible at a time, so
| they must do something to fine-tune it.
|
| That being said, I'm sure they have a base model too, so
| I'm right back to wondering about the parent question:
| would it work if you set it down in front of a few fresh
| gates?
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Probably not. RL is really bad at generalising to unseen
| environments. There was a paper about an ... otter?
|
| _Why Generalization in RL is Difficult: Epistemic POMDPs
| and Implicit Partial Observability_
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06277
|
| OK, it's a robotic zookeeper looking for the otter cage.
|
| Where does it say they had no prior knowledge before the
| event? I can't find that in the text. Is it in the video?
|
| I guess there's no paper yet.
| itishappy wrote:
| > Where does it say they had no prior knowledge before
| the event? I can't find that in the text. Is it in the
| video?
|
| Reading back through it, I'm synthesizing this statement.
| It's never said explicitly, and I could very well be
| wrong.
|
| I'm combining the knowledge that the novel development
| here is that the event supervisors control the track with
| the fact they're showing off a training run in their
| video.[0] The video also links a few papers from the
| teams past that have some additional clues.[1][2]
|
| > The reason for this mostly lies in the real-world
| aspects of the competitions. They take place in
| environments previously unknown by the teams, with no
| opportunity for benign, solution-specific changes, and
| little time for adapting the developed solution to the
| environment in situ. Moreover, competitions often pose a
| more challenging environment, with gates located slightly
| differently than on the precommunicated maps or even
| moving during the race, unforeseen lighting effects
| optimized for spectators rather than for drones, and
| large crowds of moving people around the flight arena.
|
| This makes it sound like they're at least given the
| layout.
|
| Note this was from a different competition (Artificial
| Intelligence Robotic Racing by Lockheed, with DRL) back
| in 2019. The other paper is from 2024, but I don't have
| access.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10876009
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10611665
| 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
| roughly wrote:
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE
|
| I'm reminded of when the US military figured out it should
| just replace all its proprietary field drone controllers with
| Xbox controllers because every single grunt that enlisted
| already had 10,000 hours on the things. If the future of
| warfare is drones, Christ, that video is terrifying.
| itishappy wrote:
| Funny you should say that. Gamepads are not quite what you
| want for drone piloting for three main reasons:
|
| 1. Less precise. Gimble size matters.
|
| 2. All inputs sprung. This is exactly what you want for
| your three rotational axis, but you absolutely do not want
| your throttle resetting to 50% when you lay off. You can
| fix this using 3D mode where the zero setting is in the
| middle, but then you lose even more precision.
|
| 3. Circular inputs. This means at low or high throttle you
| have less roll available.
|
| The main reason you'd want a gamepad is the size and shape.
| They do make gamepad-style radios, like the Radiomaster
| Pocket, which combine the best of both worlds.
|
| You can pick up a simulator for $10-20 if anyone wants to
| give it a whirl, and many are even on Steam, but the
| general recommendation is to pick up a dedicated radio as
| soon as possible.
|
| Note that this mainly applies to FPV quadcopters, due to
| how sensitive and twitchy they can be. When it comes to
| controlling pretty much anything else (I'd argue even most
| planes) these advantages are no longer relevant.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| The US military is not limited to using stock COTS
| hardware. They have imitated the form factor and general
| feel of those controls, but custom built and ruggedized.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/fmcu-us-military-controller/
| 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.
| emsign wrote:
| So the drones in the Slaughterbots short film were depicted to be
| way too slow.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Have the team published based on this work yet?
| pacetest wrote:
| No, but there's a previous paper for the controller used:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21586
| polishdude20 wrote:
| > Flying drones faster will be important for many economic and
| societal applications, ranging from delivering blood samples and
| defibrillators in time to finding people in natural disaster
| scenarios
|
| Ah yes. No mention of the real big use case
| Leo-thorne wrote:
| I've seen AI beat humans in simulations before, but doing it on a
| real track with the same hardware is honestly kind of amazing.
| What surprised me the most is they didn't use any traditional
| flight controller. They just let the neural network handle the
| flying.
|
| I'm really curious how this would perform in messier, less
| controlled environments.
| shinycode wrote:
| A side note, will we still attend and watch Formula 1 races it
| AI would drive cars (maybe near perfection) ?
| tialaramex wrote:
| Human sports remain interesting when the humans are notably
| worse at whatever they do than a machine purpose built for
| it, or indeed wildlife that specialised for this.
|
| Usain Bolt was the fastest human sprinter in the world, but
| compared to a good motorcycle over paved road he's obviously
| not very fast, and likewise compared to an emu. Nevertheless,
| Bolt's 100m performance drew big crowds, even though people
| also watch Motorcycle racing and (I think?) Emu racing.
|
| It's like speed running, the categories are arbitrary and
| self-selecting. Why the Modern Pentathlon? Why not. Why Super
| Mario Warpless? Why not. If everybody wanted to do Super
| Mario, only the odd numbered levels and also you must kill
| all the enemies, that's what the run is, our choices are
| arbitrary and we value whatever we like.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Yes. People thought computers would kill chess, but despite
| current chess engines being able to trounce every human in
| existence, chess is more popular than ever.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| That said "regular" chess is deeply in crisis, with less
| computer-assisted formats coming up to challenge it.
| Aziell wrote:
| This technological breakthrough is truly amazing, especially the
| fact that the drone can fly on an actual race track
| independently, without relying on human control. It's really
| cool. But honestly, as AI gets better at doing what we can do,
| even better in some cases, it makes me a little uneasy. Will
| there come a day when we truly become redundant, with AI taking
| over the work?
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Quite cool but this is the beginning of the end I'm afraid
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| The actual race is also worth watching:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
|
| The speed and flawlessness is quite impressive considering it is
| being resolved with what I imagine is noisy inertial data and a
| motion blurred CCD camera.
| tonii141 wrote:
| Let's not forget that this works solely for this particular
| racing setup. If you change a single gate, the AI they are using
| would not be able to adapt. Still fascinating, though.
| _ache_ wrote:
| Nearly two years from comparable to human to beat the best.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/08/30/1196777528/an-ai-quadcopter-h...
| miki123211 wrote:
| This makes me wonder what the "best" vehicle for human racing
| would be like, if there was no requirement for a human driver.
|
| Let's say your task is to move a human from A to B (by a pre-
| designated route) as fast as possible. The only conditions are
| vehicle weight, no outside radio contact and no damaging the road
| (assume each vehicle goes separately, so e.g. slip stream effects
| don't matter). You can rely on the human to drive or use AI, you
| can go on the ground or fly through the air, anything is allowed.
| What would be the best way to do this?
| polonbike wrote:
| Well .. it depends on other assumptions, like the amount and
| type of energy allowed (continuous gigawatt electricity access
| during the trip ?), amount of "roughness" the human can sustain
| during the trip (canonball a human packed in an big airbag ?),
| actual budget limit for the project, etc ....
| npilk wrote:
| Not exactly what you're after, but similar: https://what-
| if.xkcd.com/116/
| 83 wrote:
| >> The only conditions are vehicle weight, no outside radio
| contact and no damaging the road
|
| Desiccate the human and compact him into an aerodynamic shape.
| Carry the (now much lighter and more aerodynamic) human inside
| a small rocket.
| _joel wrote:
| "Coming to a battlefield near you soon."
| northisup wrote:
| I highly recommend Macross Plus for further research this topic:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2330912/
| wslh wrote:
| Even R2D2 doesn't pilot the X-wing itself.
| palmotea wrote:
| > This is more than just a racing win. The smart lightweight AI
| that powered the drone could help all kinds of future robots,
| making them faster, more efficient, and better at...
|
| ...killing you, their target.
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