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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

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Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#191

Post by david-gpu »

actionfromafar wrote: post #142
david-gpu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_(Spa…

There are no silver bullets. It's just that having (solely) an elite warrior class is an extra risk.

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#192

Post by orthoxerox »

lolc wrote: post #148
worldsayshi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious counter to a laser could be 'more drones'? And maybe just have the drones sneak up close to the ground.

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.

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#193

Post by 542354234235 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #116
Legend2440 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

“[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

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#195

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

itishappy wrote: post #68
leeoniya wrote: post #48

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?

They had no prior knowledge of the course.

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#196

Post by martin_a »

lbotos wrote: post #39
atonse wrote: 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.

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#197

Post by dghlsakjg »

stackedinserter wrote: post #162
dghlsakjg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

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…

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...

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#198

Post by ashoeafoot »

mschuster91 wrote: post #155
somenameforme wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 w…

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.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#199

Post by akie »

close04 wrote: post #137
NegativeLatency wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 toda…

> 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.

If we are ok with AI drones autonomously choosing bombing targets, then you're right.
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