Drone wars

[Cory Trevor]

I had really never thought about all the drone warfare stuff, it’s not really my cup of tea. But the other day I was working with someone that showed me footage from the drones during battles. I had no idea that some were essentially kamikaze drones that flew into individual people and blew up on contact. It was pretty wild to watch

 

[ppragman]

Nobody is going to make a functional terminator with something like a raspberry pi.

No... but... you could make an autonomous drone with facial recognition, human body recognition, etc. I've done crappy facial recognition on a raspberry pi zero even. It isn't great, but the tech is there to build some sort of • autonomy "fly 500m to the west, crash into anything with a face" lol. Jetson Nano and various other boards are close to what you need. You could do that in GPS denied areas too - kind of like a smart shell? I don't know... war isn't my field, so I hesitate to think of too many ideas, but what you can run human body recognition on and facial recognition on is getting more and more accessible by the day.

Isn't that switchblade drone autonomous? Or semi-autonomous? But you can definitely run human and limited facial recognition on a raspberry pi.

Now is that going to be a full on weapon system tomorrow? Nah... but I suspect we'll see crappy hunter killer drones. I'd be surprised if the Ukrainians and Russians weren't already doing that? I don't know, I doubt any of that is public if they are. Also, the Ukrainians have thousands of hours of training data too (if they're keeping the kill footage), so... you know, you could use that. "Fly 500M on inertial navigation, then kill anything with a face" is distressing but probably possible now.

 

[Skåning]

Did they ever figure out what those New Jersey sightings were all about?

 

[Lawman]

No... but... you could make an autonomous drone with facial recognition, human body recognition, etc. I've done crappy facial recognition on a raspberry pi zero even. It isn't great, but the tech is there to build some sort of • autonomy "fly 500m to the west, crash into anything with a face" lol. Jetson Nano and various other boards are close to what you need. You could do that in GPS denied areas too - kind of like a smart shell? I don't know... war isn't my field, so I hesitate to think of too many ideas, but what you can run human body recognition on and facial recognition on is getting more and more accessible by the day.

Isn't that switchblade drone autonomous? Or semi-autonomous? But you can definitely run human and limited facial recognition on a raspberry pi.

Now is that going to be a full on weapon system tomorrow? Nah... but I suspect we'll see crappy hunter killer drones. I'd be surprised if the Ukrainians and Russians weren't already doing that? I don't know, I doubt any of that is public if they are. Also, the Ukrainians have thousands of hours of training data too (if they're keeping the kill footage), so... you know, you could use that. "Fly 500M on inertial navigation, then kill anything with a face" is distressing but probably possible now.

That’s not anything achieving the autonomy or the promised capability sets we’ve been advertised. Like I said, we’ve got a long way to go to the promised advertisement videos being delivered on what these thing are destined to do.

Essentially what you’re talking about is a group 1/2 UAS with some level of target assist, and to the earlier point one that is occurring directly on a drone so it depletes power that could be used for range or payload lift. Switchblade (or Lasso) still requires a lot of human in the loop to execute launch to target and they are already expensive. And that person operating them can’t be just any idiot, proof being the Pk rate of those systems when applied across total uses not the highlight reels both sides keep posting to Reddit/telegram/etc. Basic face recognition could be decoyed or deceived just as easily as programmed, the whole adaptation part of warfare. We’ve got similar AI assist modes for finding things like right angles in trees, etc…. Those could also be programmed to simply ask to strike and then home on them, but that’s not a good method of target discrimination. Target discrimination and adherence to a form of high payoff/value target listing is part of the critical actions an AI would have to parse and execute. I’ve argued I don’t need an AI drone to target, I need n AI drone that can read operational orders that were badly written. It’s important to remember that if producing casualties is the sole dollar number value… these drones are a few to 10s or even 100s of thousands of dollars, so producing single digit casualties is not economic to the expense of putting them out there in place of a mortar are artillery shell. What you see with the Smalls conducting individual targeting is scary, but in reality it’s just a new form of the sporadic shelling or sniper fire that has always acted to terrorize and disorganize front line forces.

For everybody selling drones as the “revolution in warfare” or “the tank is dead” it’s important to counter with the fact that people have been saying that since the Sagger missiles appeared in the battlefield in the 73 Yom Kippur conflict. We’ve been countering such car salesmen from the primes with things like briefing a bunch of people wearing stars on the physical limits of mission command via electronic networks and how there is a physical limit to how far forward they can push the forward line of robotics with the current systems at hand.