241–250 of 342 posts
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We all understand that. People are simply observing that there an obvious path from this technology demonstrator to something similar in the battlefield.
You mean the stuff that anyone knew was possible 10 years ago, but was waiting for the tech to become much cheaper?
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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 c…
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
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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…
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?
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.
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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…
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…
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.
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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.
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…
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> 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.
I expect Russia will be ok with it in any situation.
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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.
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. T…
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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?
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…
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
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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. T…
$4k per drone... ouch.
Whole program is about a third of the cost of a Type 26 Frigate.
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.