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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

#51

Post by switchbak »

stackedinserter wrote: post #8
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.

OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.

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 aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#52

Post by AlienRobot »

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.

Drones flying through your windows to deliver things faster.

Cons: massive invasion of privacy and probably illegal.

Pros: looks cool.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#55

Post by nothrabannosir »

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.

Obligatory link to the short film (future documentary) “Slaughterbots” (2017), which depicts exactly this in harrowing detail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#56

Post by itishappy »

bri3d wrote: post #26

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…

There's a few more details in the press release from the league itself. Sounds like they were really trying to put these things through their paces.

> The course design pushed the boundaries of perception-based autonomy—featuring wide gate spacing, irregular lighting, and minimal visual markers. The use of rolling shutter cameras further heightened the difficulty, testing each team’s ability to deliver fast, stable performance under demanding conditions

https://a2rl.io/press-release/9/artificial-intelligence-triu...

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#57

Post by tonyarkles »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #34
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.

Some of this stuff is getting to the point where we will seriously need to have a global talk on whether we should put a pin in this tech or not

The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make.

We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.

The cat is definitely out of the bag.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#58

Post by belter »

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/dr...

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#59

Post by AngryData »

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.

Im more worried about these type of things causing us to blast each other and ourselves back to the 1920s or so during conflicts when small explosive EMPs start being viewed as less damaging than drones and robots. A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast. The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage, but if drone bombs represent even more damage they become viable. Yeah it will destroy all the radios around and fuck up a bunch of expensive equipment, but you would still have soldiers with guns rather than just smoking craters.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#60

Post by itishappy »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #11
siavosh wrote: post #6

I 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.

This is that. This race used only a single forward-facing camera and IMU fed to an onboard Orin NX.
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