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How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#31

Post by FirmwareBurner »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #9
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.

Maybe not completely, at least not for the camera sensors. If it has good enough initial targeting data - or a good enough last image from the camera - it may be able to find the target by inertial navigation from there (depending on laser range, of course).

> it may be able to find the target by inertial navigation from there

Or miss by a long shot and hit a civilian instead.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#35

Post by bell-cot »

flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

To be fair, that's a relatively buried and brief aspect in the article. Which is otherwise heavy on real-world military realities.

Personally, I see anyone fretting about imperfect drones making those decisions as either (1) one of today's 10K, or (2) a performer covering a trending topic. Land mines were deployed at giga-scale over a century ago (WWI). Spring-guns were enough of a problem in England to be outlawed two centuries ago.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#36

Post by dralley »

oldpersonintx2 wrote: post #34
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Each day closer to Oblivion. EDIT: Apparently the reference wasn't clear. https://marvelstorybook.fandom.com/wiki/Drone_(Oblivion)

[flagged]

Or, perhaps, he's just tired of these bombers chucking missiles at apartment blocs and children's hospitals and power plants. If Russia weren't using these bombers against Ukraine 3+ times a week they wouldn't be attractive targets.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#37

Post by varjag »

bamboozled wrote: post #30
Ciantic wrote: post #19

The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4] [1]: https://ardupilot.org/ [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk... [3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot [4]: https://www.404media.co/ukra…

"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot." https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo

The drones reportedly flew from their containers to the staging area autonomously, where they were taken over by the pilots for the attack approach.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#38

Post by lukan »

yaris wrote: post #27
user568439 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stressed private might still have a bit of empathy and humanity. Meanwhile millions of drones can be programmed (or hacked) to kill millions of people without excluding civilians or anyone

My understanding is that a drone will make decisions that are reproducible (same data - same decision), so if anything goes wrong then it should be possible to investigate (to some extent) and fix. A stressed private is in this sense ”undebuggable” because much more not-easily-reproducible factors influence decisions. Also I’m afraid that stressed and tired privates at war tend to err towards ”just kill them all” bec…

The data is never the same. Every situation in war (or reality in general) is unique.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#39

Post by bamboozled »

varjag wrote: post #37
bamboozled wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot." https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo

The drones reportedly flew from their containers to the staging area autonomously, where they were taken over by the pilots for the attack approach.

Source?

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#40

Post by pjmlp »

bamboozled wrote: post #33
pjmlp wrote: post #10

Each day closer to Oblivion. EDIT: Apparently the reference wasn't clear. https://marvelstorybook.fandom.com/wiki/Drone_(Oblivion)

Oblivion for potentially nuclear armed bombers?

To the drones used in the movie.
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