Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

tudelft.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 342 posts

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#301

Post by tonii141 »

bicepjai wrote: post #267
tonii141 wrote: post #135

Let's not forget that this works solely for this particular racing setup. If you change a single gate, the AI they are using would not be able to adapt. Still fascinating, though.

Famous last words :)

I have been involved in research focused on ML control for some time, and believe me, I would love to see an AI model capable of controlling arbitrary systems at different operating points or in different environments. However, it is simply not feasible yet. This AI drone is no different, especially because reinforcement learning was used to train the model, which is generally not practical for real-world systems due to disturbance variables and the continuous need for adaptability.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#302

Post by speeder »

somenameforme wrote: post #115
trhway wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, kinda. Paraguay managed to almost wipe itself out. The war only stopped after virtually all Paraguayan men were dead.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#303

Post by beeflet »

vbezhenar wrote: post #299

FPVs are the most distinctive element in Russian-Ukrainian war, changing many traditional war dogmas. So far AI in this war wasn't heavily used, FPVs are controlled by humans at both sides. I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but it'll be utilised by military operations to kill more people, to conduct terror acts, controlled from afar. It allows weak players to have more leverage which is…

I don't know, this drone race is to combat drones what F1 racing is to self driving cars. In order to win in these races, you just need to precisely control speed around well-defined turns and stuff. You don't need to adapt to a new environment. It's not surprising to me that a computer program would win in such a controlled environment.

> It allows weak players to have more leverage

I think it depends on the dominant type of defensive counter-technology used. If it's something with high capital costs like a laser or a microwave, then it will centralize combat because the USA could invest in the infrastructure needed to defeat terrorists, but not the reverse. On the other hand, if you can effectively destroy these things with birdshot, then it may not be a problem for humanity at large. I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone.

For example look at the iron dome: it is effective defense measure but very difficult to scale up to counter ICBMs.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#304

Post by rapnie »

jandrese wrote: 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.

Technical University Delft. Not a word about ethics of developing these AI technologies. Happy techbros making happy gadgets.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#305

Post by beeflet »

amoshebb wrote: post #218
542354234235 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“[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…

>with enough agility to thread a needle faster than a turret can swing its own mass

If it has a range of 1.5km, then the drone needs to be moving really fast in order to move a couple of degrees per second.

If it's going like 80mph, then that's 36m/s, which comes out to <1.4 degrees/s at 1500m away. For 1000m, you get ~2 degrees/s. Not to mention that this velocity is at a right angle to the turret, and you have to close the distance.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#306

Post by FridayoLeary »

beeflet wrote: post #303
vbezhenar wrote: post #299

FPVs are the most distinctive element in Russian-Ukrainian war, changing many traditional war dogmas. So far AI in this war wasn't heavily used, FPVs are controlled by humans at both sides. I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but it'll be utilised by military operations to kill more people, to conduct terror acts, controlled from afar. It allows weak players to have more leverage which is…

I don't know, this drone race is to combat drones what F1 racing is to self driving cars. In order to win in these races, you just need to precisely control speed around well-defined turns and stuff. You don't need to adapt to a new environment. It's not surprising to me that a computer program would win in such a controlled environment. > It allows weak players to have more leverage I think it depends on the dominan…

What point are you trying to make. Because the iron dome is hideously expensive. It costs so much more then the missiles it intercepts that it's worth it for terrorists to fire on israel purely to waste their money.

The iranian icbms from Yemen gets shot down by other systems. I don't think they are scaled up versions of the iron dome. What's interesting is the lack of confidence israel has in predicting their trajectory. They usually send up multiple interceptors for a single missile and put sirens on for half the country.

The only really economical counter i've heard of is lasers but it doesn't look like they are coming any time soon.

I've got no idea what method Israel uses to counter drones, but they certainly have struggled with them.

My absolute nightmare scenario is Iran via its proxies unleashing swarms of autonomous kamikaze drones in population centres.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#307

Post by yunwal »

dylan604 wrote: post #79
yunwal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is not anonymous

goodgooglymoogly, some people just are not creative thinkers at all. you think someone with the ability of creating a suitcase nuke isn't going to have the means to have a fake identity specifically for this purpose? or just steal someone else's? or being willing to make that sacrifice so being anonymous isn't a requirement?

Drones seem a lot easier and more flexible than all that. And you could operate them at scale. I’m not particularly concerned about weapons in the hands of an isolated criminal. That already exists everywhere. I’m concerned about sophisticated organizations

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#308

Post by 4ggr0 »

Lu2025 wrote: post #236
worldsayshi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will likely come out somewhere in between our fears and our hopes. So it's good that we double down on imagining hopeful scenarios. Makes it easier to realize them.

Not so sure. Russia arranged a lot of "worst case scenarios" for all of us. It will take a lot of effort to get to "okay" again.

In current times it's very strange not to include the US in such claims...

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#309

Post by vbezhenar »

rhcom2 wrote: post #264
IshKebab wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$4k per drone... ouch.

One Tu-22M is $100 million.

It is priceless. It's not produced anymore. You can't exchange $100 million for new Tu-22M. Not exactly priceless, you probably can replicate the production by rebuilding the factories for every component and all related production chains. But that'll be much more than $100 million.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#310

Post by officeplant »

vbezhenar wrote: post #299

FPVs are the most distinctive element in Russian-Ukrainian war, changing many traditional war dogmas. So far AI in this war wasn't heavily used, FPVs are controlled by humans at both sides. I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but it'll be utilised by military operations to kill more people, to conduct terror acts, controlled from afar. It allows weak players to have more leverage which is…

> I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but ...

It unfortunately goes even deeper than that. The Quadcopter FPV community is watching their open source software actively be picked up for warfare, and can often tell what version they were running when watching released Russian & Ukrainian footage later.

Every beneficial step we make in the maker community will be used to expedite death in conflict. A few 3D printers and a digikey order are all you really need to seed an insurgent movement at this point.

Post reply on HN