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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
211–220 of 342 posts
Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 en…
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.
Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#213I 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?
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.
>>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...
Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#214This 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 huma…
>> 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.
Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
> 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 n…
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Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#216This 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.
>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…
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Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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...
Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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”
Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#219Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
#220This 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.
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.
The UK has also released some details of a new 'in bulk' RF-based drone takedown DEW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vY5efYXMQ