321–330 of 342 posts
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I think Ukraine would be ok with AI drones launched next to a Russian airfield autonomously choosing targets... I expect Russia will be ok with it in any situation.
Obviously the Russians wouldn't be one hundred percent okay with drones autonomously choosing targets in or near Russian airfields...
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Uh, jamming has been used since the beginning of the Russian/Ukrainian war. Its literally one of the main areas that has become a game of cat and mouse on both sides. The Black Eye is a suitcase-sized radio noisemaker that can muddle the signals that control all but the best fiber-optic drones. According to an electronic warfare expert who writes under the pseudonym “Roy,” Black Eye can ground surveillance and attack…
I think you're missing the whole 'autonomous' thing here. There is no signal, and there is no operator.
The Department is mitigating the potential negative effects of unmanned systems on U.S. forces, assets, and installations – at home and abroad. A critical portion of our efforts, particularly in the near-term, comes from improving our defenses, with an emphasis on detection as well as active and passive defenses
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/05/2003599149/-1/-1/0/FAC...
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I think you're missing the whole 'autonomous' thing here. There is no signal, and there is no operator.
The US govt has been working on countering autonomous drones for years now. The Department is mitigating the potential negative effects of unmanned systems on U.S. forces, assets, and installations – at home and abroad. A critical portion of our efforts, particularly in the near-term, comes from improving our defenses, with an emphasis on detection as well as active and passive defenses https://media.defense.gov/2024…
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…
> which is present on the drone and use direct IMU input and ESC commands from the Jetson Does the jetson board even have the appropriate UARTs on it to talk directly to the ESCs? Your typical hobby grade 5" class size ESC (either 4-in-1 or discrete) cannot talk to two different controllers at the same time. If it's already wired to the four UART outputs from a 30x30 size flight controller (such as something STM32H7…
Digging in, you could probably bitbang DShot on Orin GPIOs. It would be really sketchy since it's presumably running Linux on out-of-order cores with giant cache, so there's nothing close to realtime going on, but it's so damn fast that the theoretical problem probably doesn't matter and I bet it would work fine.
Orin also has "safety island" for ASIL applications which has lockstep Cortex-R52s. This would be ideal to run an integrated flight controller RTOS but it's supposedly fused off on consumer boards, lame. There's also a Cortex-R5 called "SPE" that could probably run a flight control RTOS as well.
Regardless of all of this theory craft, I was either totally wrong or accidentally right in two ways, depending on how you want to look at it: according to a sibling post, the STM32 board actually runs the NN-backed stabilization loop rather than a PID one! I've seen this done in research before but never in a meaningfully successful way, so I'm even more impressed now - as far as I can tell, it's _two_ novel solves, an actually working PID-or-better NN-based stabilization system on STM32 _and_ inside-out vision based flight planning for racing on the Nvidia board.
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The US govt has been working on countering autonomous drones for years now. The Department is mitigating the potential negative effects of unmanned systems on U.S. forces, assets, and installations – at home and abroad. A critical portion of our efforts, particularly in the near-term, comes from improving our defenses, with an emphasis on detection as well as active and passive defenses https://media.defense.gov/2024…
Its been working on countering drones (unmanned systems) for years; most of the drone threat it has been focused on is not autonomous but remotely-controlled. But there is considerable overlap in countermeasures (other than ones that target the control channel of remotely controlled drones.)
(Other than CIWS, because nothing like that can be used on land.)
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> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it. They can , depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian b…
Note for example, that Ukraine attack, although it caused no civilian casualties... it relied heavily on civilian infrastructure. Ukraine rented warehouses, common trucks, and hid the drones in normal shipping containers. Thus indeed, this made the battlefield larger instead, now common trucks, warehouses and shipping containers are legitimate targets. What Ukraine destroyed doesn't help either, for example they dest…
yes, that is the point i've been making for a while - those cheap automated systems, the drones being the first examples of it, is the new MAD/equalizer weapons now available to all countries, not only to the large nuclear ones (and that becomes very important for avoiding future wars giving for example growing doubt that NATO, and USA in particular, would come to the defense of Baltic countries, whereis several millions of drones (including larger long range ones) which Baltic countries can get relatively easy for several billions of dollars may pose an unacceptable high cost to Russia of any potential aggression against those countries).
In this particular case a much smaller Ukraine can use that MAD/equalizer potential to win the war, or at least to get a great negotiating position by systematically severely degrading Russia's strategic capabilities toward making Russia potentially defenseless against US or China, or even say Turkey.
That is how i think they can degrade strategic air/missile defense systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529638
And imagine if similarly to the plane attack Ukraine would attack Russian nuclear submarines parked openly at the bases (say using ships for drone launching instead of trucks) - there is no risk of destruction of those submarines, yet 10-50kg drone can damage the skin and outer hull forcing the submarine out of service for prolonged time.
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Its been working on countering drones (unmanned systems) for years; most of the drone threat it has been focused on is not autonomous but remotely-controlled. But there is considerable overlap in countermeasures (other than ones that target the control channel of remotely controlled drones.)
What countermeasures exist against a swarm of autonomous drones, other than an EMP weapon? (Other than CIWS, because nothing like that can be used on land.)
Someone should tell the US, UK, Israel, and Australia (all of whom operate the Centurion C-RAM/Land Phalanx Weapon System) [0] that that land-based CIWS system, and any potential similar system, cannot be used on land.
I remember being blown away by a TED talk were "minimum snap trajectories" are planned for quadcopters to fly through hoops and slots. It's really cool to see this happening fully autonomously and at such high speed. I wonder if the use of AI means that the approach is fundamentally different, or if it uses the same principle of minimizing snap? https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_co...
It's fundamentally different, it's using an RL trained network that gets the drone state (position, orientation, velocity) as input and directly outputs motor commands.
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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…
> 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? 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…
Yeah, I read it as saying they were given a short amount of time to train before the race, where they wouldn't have time restrictions otherwise. Which makes the result more impressive, of course.
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All hard countered by a laser like the Iron Beam, no? Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?
Combined arms is the probable solution for a Ukraine type war. As soon as your expensive laser lights up, it's got a couple of minutes to move before artillery shells arrive. Of course deeper into Russia that's safe .. but instead you have the problem of a huge area to cover. You can protect a few high value targets but not everywhere. Consider something like the early stages of the Iraq war: target every single civi…