How to Do Real Time Object Detection on Drones
blog.nanonets.com
blog.nanonets.com
There's some mention at the end of the article on how to attach a PC to the drone, but basically it would be the same thing: just run the processing on a PC.
Just by the title, I was expecting a clever way to run a pre-trained model directly on a drone.
And given some on-board weapons, we would never have to worry about civil unrest again. Only people grateful for the food and job they are allowed to be in our society. Utopia!
All new technology will have some deviant use case associated with it. The internet is one of the worst enablers of child pornography, human trafficking and everything disgusting with the world. However it just means you try and control the use of technology not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Maybe my question is based on the assumption that you agree: stopping development of the technology in the first place is not the solution. Hopefully this assumption is correct.
Surely it would only be a matter of choosing to increase the efforts for a year or so in order to take these weapons from proof-of-concept to highly effective. E.g. autonomous flying gun platforms that can be deployed en masse and let loose with small or no human oversight (e.g. "hold the button to kill the person the machine has identified as a valid target", if even that level of control), or the kind of flying, target-seeking grenades envisioned in the linked video. With any level of autonomy, loitering and communication with command. It's only ethics and public perception that stops this today. In total war, a 20% mis-classification rate doesn't matter. Bombing doctrine in WW2 was much, much worse than this in its effect on civilians. Hell, many military leaders emphasized killing civilians as a desirable objective. Even present-day attacks consider "collateral damage" acceptable, even if politicians sometimes pretend otherwise.
Defending against weapons like that would be an arms race in itself, and completely beyond the reach of weaker actors. At least on a tactical level. Maybe there's strategies that could be employed as a low-cost defense, such as staying out of sensor range or confusing the sensors with adversarial patterns, but it would crush the resistance of anyone that tried a conventional defense.
Does the post-WW2 doctrine of emphasizing trade and the un-profitability of war, or ensuring that it is more economical for everyone to support a stable, free democratic economic system, still have any hope of preventing such weapons from being used?
Perhaps this is naive: One matter I never hear of, and is underestimated is automation of the legal system, and its equalizing effect. I have high hopes for it, although to be fair, our society is as unequal as we are. But those who cannot win the battle will have everything they need. And those who never have enough will be put in their places, and ideally technologists and scientists can take over from politicians, if we aren't automated ourselves. Then I wish to submit a request for democratization of computing power to the legal skynet, which grants it, and that in theory gives me my freedom as much as a gun claims it does. I should be able to own dust sensors to monitor intruding dust sensors. High hopes.
Some people make fun of elon musk for mars, but he has a point.
But thanks for turning my fanthom chills into real ones. The downvotes are from those who believe otherwise, which is not bad at all to see.
I wanted to mention something about certain areas of research on similar grounds, but I am not topping dust sensors by a long shot. Although my suspicions are probably correct then.
Again, I am probably on the naive-spectrum, but deep down, I feel if I don't ever go after money, I'll have less of a say in how the world plays out, and I am more fair than most I know, so I have a responsibility (I currently do research for research's sake, attic-style, and unfortunately I am only moderately bright, but bright enough to see through the facade where I am living that many many things only exist and function so the rich may remain rich, despite new technologies).
Let's see them stop me from procuring a weapon.
FFS, even my ISP is more of a problem than dust sensors.
Data for training such models for practical use are difficult to get. Often, one has to train a model on a different but related dataset that contains your object of interest and ensure that your model generalizes well. These models are highly sensitive to the data that they are trained on, so it is best if you can gather data which is closer to the actual environment (in which you want to use the model).
Also useful if you're just looking to get the video stream to your laptop/computer.