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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

tudelft.nl

31–40 of 342 posts

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#31
post #5

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.

Inspecting utilities and other industrial infrastructure.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#32
post #6

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?

The only question is whether motors or propellers will be banned for private sale first. (After drones themselves, of course.)

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#33
post #26

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…

From near the bottom: > One of the core new elements of the drone’s AI is the use of a deep neural network that doesn’t send control commands to a traditional human controller, but directly to the motors.

I saw that too - I'm assuming it means they're indeed using the DNN for stabilization. This has been done several times over the years, but generally with results which only rival PID and don't surpass it, so that's quite interesting. What's odd is that the physical architecture of the drone doesn't really make sense for this, so there must be some tweaks beyond the "spec" model. Hopefully some papers come soon instead of press releases.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#34
post #4

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.

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

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very prompt burrito delivery?

If by burrito you mean shaped charge high explosives with lethal shrapnel, triggered by facial recognition, delivered by drones the size of house sparrows at the speed of sound, then yes, burrito delivery.

Christ, you sound like my nutritionist.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#37
post #4

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.

OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#38

Interestingly, the URL for the embedded youtube video ends with the word "FATE"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE

Gives me the idea for a silly game: finding YouTube videos with words in their identifiers that are relevant to the content.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#39
post #5

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.

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#40
post #4

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.

OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.

There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones.

A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target.

Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.

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