The Era of the Drone Swarm Is Coming | Hacker News Reader

The Era of the Drone Swarm Is Coming

mwi.usma.edu

I’ve brought up this eventuality countless times in the past couple of years (including recently mentioning this in my software company).

I don’t think people are realizing the dangers to minitrization and ease of manufacturing small drones that could kill people. Either through mini bombs, or carrying diseases.

What are we doing about it? Seems like we aren’t doing anything

Some people are doing things. There's an outfit at DIU (Defense Innovation Unit) called Rogue Squadron who's job it is to conduct counter-UAS research.

I’ll check it out. I’m still trying to find a way we can protect ourselves though. The best I can come up with is (at home) a droppable net that covers your windows that has a current running through it. Maybe something similar for a personal device.

Beyond that, hacking into their WiFi or navigation signals. But how do you do that?

Why do you think someone would try to kill you in your home with a drone? Do you have a lot of mortal enemies?

Same thing has been said about guns. And data collection. And the government using data to spy on us.

It doesn’t matter if you have mortal enemies, or if you aren’t doing bad things, or if it matters if the government spies on you.

What matters is that it’s possible. And it’s a very real possibility.

All sorts of bad things are possible. So what. People with guns could shoot you through your windows today, but the reality is that almost never happens. Most firearm deaths in the home are due to suicide or domestic violence.

Watch out, maybe your wife will program a drone to kill you!

Wasn't their top solution a commercial T-shirt launcher full of chaff?

I'm surprised there's no mention of the short film "Slaughterbots" on this exact topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw&vl=en

It's very well done and has an HN vibe to it (with a dark twist, of course).

And just about a year before that on Black Mirror.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5709236/

No need to panic. Just because the video has high production values doesn't mean it's an accurate prediction of the future, or that effective countermeasures won't be found.

I’m gonna have to say I disagree. We are already making tiny drones the size of bees. And you don’t need that size to make a reliable, one shot bomb to kill someone.

Anyone with time, a bit of money, and a plan can make a swarm of drones to fly into a crowd automatically and blow themselves up remotely.

The fact that I hasn’t happened already just surprises me.

I imagine Bill Gates' mosquito killing laser research is going to become a lot more popular soon.

They could've done that years ago with more conventional remote vehicles and larger bombs.

The real fact is that there aren't that many evil genius terrorists plotting a way to kill a crowd of people.

To me, the worry about killbots is state actors, not terrorists. Countries aren't usually about indiscriminate murder, they're usually trying to scythe away one group... Picking people out of a crowd and murdering them with facial recognition drones is a more realistic fear, imho.

We've never really found an effective countermeasure to bullets apart from avoiding people who want to shoot us.

If someone develops what is essentially a bullet with 365-degree acceleration, I doubt there is going to be a better strategy than hoping that one is never fired at us.

Modern US military body armor is actually quite an effective countermeasure against most bullets. Check the casualty statistics from recent conflicts.

Oh, yay, always looked forward to having everyone walk around in military grade body armor.

The point is that — contrary to what @roenxi asserted — effective countermeasures do exist for those who really need them. But the vast majority of us are at near zero risk of being shot today or attacked by drones in the future. No one cares enough about us to kill us. Let's not be paranoid.

China is almost wholly dependent upon U.S. citizens for their economic growth and well-being, so the idea that China is itching to start a hot war with the U.S. is rather laughable, at least for the near future.

Remember, it's always bad business to kill your customers.

I think by far the more credible threat, of course, is from terrorists (foreign and perhaps even domestic, as horrific as that seems) and do hope that the superpowers of the world come up with some defense systems that are able to mitigate such attacks.

But to be honest...this new military-sponsored "killer robot" world we are barreling headlong into gives shudders to most sane, peace-loving citizens, no?

So on your world map it's only US and China?

I would encourage countries like China or Russia to develop cheap mass drone swarm systems that can deny access to airspace to any adversary. A country could sell this sort of service for hundreds of billions of dollars to another country like an insurance policy. Entire wars could be made impossible. It would be great progress for the world.

Please, China and Russia, don't do this.

> Entire wars could be made impossible.

Maybe, but it might make others go nuclear if there aren't conventional options available anymore.

Canard or red herring used to justify militarism and military aggression. In our world when countries get too powerful to fight they usually simply don't and use proxies to fight conventional wars.

Something like the “Dog Dod Grid” from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age...

>> Atlantis/Shanghai occupied the loftiest ninety percent of New Chusan's land area - an inner plateau about a mile above sea level, where the air was cooler and cleaner. Parts of it were marked off with a lovely wrought-iron fence, but the real border was defended by something called the dog pod grid - a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats...

>> These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern about ten centimeters apart near the ground (close enough to stop a dog but not a cat, hence "dog pods") and spaced wider as they got higher.

Further reading: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=243

anti drone swarm drone: several dozen large-ish sized x8 hexacopters, capable of 2 hour flight time and carrying a 10kg load, with a gimbal mounted semiauto 12 gauge shotgun + large magazine of birdshot shells.

Drone swarms are possible, sure, but it's also quite possible to miniaturize existing concepts of antiaircraft missiles and guns, and automate those.

Or build swarms of disposable 2 meter wingspan size drones that can fly above a drone swarm, and drop chaff consisting of long lengths of fishing line. Tangle propellers.

Basically something like this, which is a bit smaller than the Zipline drones:

https://www.banggood.com/Believer-1960mm-Wingspan-EPO-Portab...

anti anti drone swarm drone drone swarm: a swarm of those.

or, fly a C-17 sized aircraft at FL400 over the anti-anti-anti-droneswarm and drop many metric tons of unspooled fine gauge fishing line. More seriously though, if small drone swarms will be limited in the altitudes that they can reach (being limited by battery life, not enough motor runtime to ascend to FL200, travel laterally, and then down to a ground attack again, for instance), any modern air force that can establish air superiority over a battlefield... Will have a lot of different options to attack drone swarms from above.

...100 years later it’s all nanoscale and we’re living in ‘The Diamond Age” and wondering where it all went wrong.

Drones are small and hard to see with small cheap sensors. You have to see them to shoot them, the range of a shotgun is very small, and the sky is a big place.

What are the aerodynamic abilities of a drone swarm? That is, to what altitude can a swarm reach, to interdict an incoming aircraft? How fast? My impression of current drones is that they are fairly small, less than 2 metres diameter, which implies pretty tight limits on range, altitude, speed, and time-on-station. So even if you have thousands of them, a conventional bomber can come over at an altitude the swarm can't reach -- or a fleet of bombers can hang off the border for hours, probing at random, until the drones run out of juice -- or a fighter can make a fast pass, dodging the much slower-climbing swarm, and drop chaff or smoke or an EMP weapon to confuse the swarm.

Bottom line, I seriously doubt drones could permanently block access to a national airspace.

look at airplanes a century ago and from the perspective of someone then try to extrapolate from those to an sr71 or a space shuttle in just a generation or two

There is a long history of people claiming that new weapons would make war impossible, going back to the crossbow. So far the predictions have been wrong.

Just another step along the way towards this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_on_Earth_(novel)

“Start learning mandarin _now_ people!” — quote from a guy in my office who is only learning mandarin because he is sure Chinese will take over world in coming decade

That is funny. I remember a rancher friend taking me on a tour of his property here in rural NorCal a few years back. He pointed at a gap in the distant hills and said, "when they come, that's where they'll come from. And when they do...we'll be ready." I had to hold back the laughter.

I believe this mental exercise was mainly just the motor component for his gun hobby, a little convenience of the subconscious.

And at the same time I also 100% believe he could hold off PLAN marines better than the average guy. :D

Like Japan was supposed to in the 1990s.

Sure the concerns over Japan buying up US real estate and driving US companies out of business seem ridiculous now. But the difference is that at Japan's economic peak they had only about half the US population, whereas now China has about four times the current US population. That's a huge difference in scale.

I was concerned when Deng was in power, but not anymore. China always seem to get in their own way.

Not mentioned in the article in the context of hardening is the use of electromagnetic pulse weapons as the basis for anti-drone swarm countermeasures. You don't need to jam their comms or disrupt their nav or hit them with shotgun pellets if you can glitch the unhardened control circuitry of their little motors.

Directional, reusable electromagnetic pulse weapons are still science fiction. Producing any significant EMP today requires a large explosion.

An EMP wirelessly overvolts circuits, burning them like a blown fuse. What kind of magnetic field would it take to induce too much current inside an Arduino?

It depends on the range. Due to the inverse square law, it would take a tremendously powerful magnetic field to induce enough current to damage even unshielded electronics at more than a few meters away.

> Directional, reusable electromagnetic pulse weapons are still science fiction

As were drone swarms a few years ago. Don't underestimate the speed with which defence contractors will deploy solutions, especially if they sense that there is profit to be made. For example, OBSIDIAN, which is claimed to use proven radar technology to detect and track drones [0].

> Producing any significant EMP today requires a large explosion.

Which might not be a problem if you are defending critical national infrastructure or a high value military asset in a shooting war.

[0] https://www.qinetiq.com/what-we-do/c4isr/obsidian

So this is mostly about drone-based warfare, which is uninteresting in the limit because nanotech and "Toner". (That's a "Diamond Age" reference.)

The challenge is securely coordinating your swarm so it can be controlled by you and not suborned by your enemies. It can't really be done, basically you wind up recapitulating an immune system and that's the best you can do. I've been thinking about this for years and there's just no way truly be certain that all your hardware will actually follow your order when the shit hits the fan.

Anyway, if you have the technology to make drone war then you also have the technology to make techno-utopia. So the real issue is for us to globally chill out and be excellent to each other. Otherwise all these machines are going to be a hazard, not a benefit. (That's a Bladerunner reference. Another scary tech is realistic beyond-the-Uncanny-Valley androids. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogates ...or same but small...)

You just have to play some good rock music. See Star Trek Beyond.

In the very short run, I think China wants to protect itself from what seems like a very adversarial, unpredictable and unreliable US.

Which automatically makes some military and defense people think how they could neuter their adversaries.

In this case, the US's biggest strength is the aircraft carriers. No other country, not even China has those many aircraft carriers.

How does one best neuter slow moving but dangerous targets? The best way is remotely causing enough damage on the hull that impedes progress.

Why will developing an equivalent swarm not help US in the short run? Because the China doesn't have such key large targets that the US could neuter. China literally doesn't have as many ships.

I think this whole uncertainty with Trump presidency is taking really ominous shape and I hope it's all ok at the end.

we're so fucked

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