When The Drones Come Marching In | Hacker News Reader

When The Drones Come Marching In

techcrunch.com

79 pointssolipsist33 comments

That embedded video is the most delightful thing I've seen linked to from HN for months. I can see new robosports coming out of this. It has a lot of visual appeal, more so than Battlebots, which sometimes looked clumsy and sometimes would sometimes turn out to be endless trading of ineffectual bumps and taps.

By scaling down to tri and quad-rotors, one simultaneously gets the excitement of flight (and crashes) with the potential for more visually interesting weaponry.

I'm completely with you, and it could be a great way to get the public interested in (i.e. funding) technology. It reminds me of when auto racing actually led to improvements for street cars. I mean kids already love various robotic cartoons - who wouldn't love the same as a real-life game. Attendance could be a little dangerous though...

Let's hope UPenn's QuadRotor Lab is in the running. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM

A complete enclosed plexiglass arena plus some weight limits and munitions regulations should be enough to keep it safe.

Yea - sounds right to me. Perhaps even kill targets on the vehicles to limit? I'd think we'd get to unkillable bots pretty quickly with aerial ones - maybe I'm wrong though. Reminds me of the spinning blade bots that seemed indestructible...

Only the well engineered spinning blade bots (like Ziggo) were nigh indestructible.

I think a lot of this could be addressed by adding ground targets to go after or protect. I can also imagine lots of munitions which would be hard to just shrug off or dodge, like nylon nets or lasers hitting photocells rigged as cutoff-switches.

Man, that video got me excited about building robots and I'm completely anti-hardware.

The thing that gets me is that the US is using these to assassinate people in Pakistan and Afghanistan, some by firring hellfire missiles at the targets.

Yet the same UAV have got to be useful to kill the president of the US (I do not have any desire to kill him, but I imagine there are people who do).

So, how the hell do you protect somebody against these kinds of weapons? The bullet-proof glass that is (almost certainly) installed in the oval office is properly enough to stop any kind of sniper bullet, but a missile? Heck the Iranians have anti-ship missiles that can fly at march 2.

How do you stop something like that? I have to guess that the Secret Service have tried, but I doubt it can be done.

They still have a radar signature. You stop them (in principle) the same way you stop all enemy aircraft.

Smaller UAVs might be hard to recognize among birds and other clutter. And you can probably apply some stealth technology to increase your chances of staying undetected.

As far as assasination machines go, an insect-sized UAV with a tiny dose of poison would be hard to beat.

One the size of a large bird could park itself on a glass window, then detonate a shaped charge that could send a jet of superhot plasma through the bulletproof glass and kill a person.

Whats the radar signature of something the size of my abdomen flying ten-twenty meters over the city streets?

The thing about nanotechnology is that people could build small machines that you can't see to kill people. Hmmmm aren't we making some sort of Luddite argument?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Yes, new technology can be used for bad things too.

You can still kill people with swords, knives and hammers. Don't knock the deadliness of old technology. As I say, it's not the gun in the hands of the lunatic in front of the leader he needs to worry about: it's the stilettos in the hands of his ambitious friends standing behind him.

For a while I've wondered how effective a swarm of drones would be against something like an F-16. With the idea that a bunch of cheap drones en masse would be more effective as a group. But I looked up the costs and realized the larger drones cost almost the same as an F-16.

Humans are surprisingly cheap and effective machines themselves.

Drones are much cheaper in a more important respect - human lives. When wars can be fought with machines, leaders don't need to pay as much attention to democratic will when choosing who to attack.

To go one step farther, with autonomous drones leaders don't even need to convince any human soldiers, much less the public.

We're well on our way from turning war from a matter of human costs into a matter of monetary cost.

Whether this is a good or bad thing only time will tell.

> Drones are much cheaper in a more important respect - human lives.

Typically drones are used against targets that are human, I don't see the drones causing less loss of life.

s/human/American/

I don't think leaders think of their enemies as human. I don't think they could sleep at night if they did.

Air and sea combat tend to place a big premium on being faster. If you can cruise strategic distances or sprint tactical distances significantly faster than your opponent, all sorts of choices open up for you. (Notably: you choose whether to engage at all, and you get all sorts of opportunities to concentrate force.) And for physical reasons that aren't going away just because of cheap chips and bandwidth, it's difficult for little vehicles to keep up with a conventional-sized aircraft, ship, or sub. Then unless the smaller vehicles are lots cheaper (in some appropriately scaled way, perhaps "cheaper per ton") to build and operate than the big ones, it's not obvious the smaller vehicles naturally have a direct advantage in slugging things out.

However, little drones (and other small-scale autonomous devices with fast computers and high-bandwidth connections) could still have a large effect on high-intensity air or naval combat even without scenarios of a modest number of supersmart drones duking it out with a conventionally-sized aircraft or ship or sub. One scenario that seems likely to me is many supersmart drones and balloons and buoys with staring passive sensors cooperating with a modest number of devices that resemble modern radar/sonar platforms and with a small number of devices that resemble 1980-era missiles or torpedoes. (In this scenario, the small vehicles do have a clear cheapness advantage in a suitably-scaled way: roughly "[much!] cheaper per kilometer of effective sensor aperture size".) Another scenario is that a war of attrition involving progressively smaller, slower, and stealthier devices might make it a new kind of PITA to secure the immobile facilities (e.g., roads and ports and airfields) that current big-vehicle systems rely on.

Of course, it's somewhat moot trying to analyze high-intensity war as a problem of engineering on the battlefield as long as we don't understand the strategic dynamics of high-intensity war in the presence of incredibly cost-effective indiscriminate weapons like hydrogen bombs. It seems to be at least as much an intractable game theory problem as an engineering problem. (And as David Friedman said, "when I am picking problems to work on, ones that stumped John von Neumann go at the bottom of the stack.")

Related story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2155845

I prefer the related story - it links directly to the project page for said awesome video. It skips the scatterbrained TC commentary and adds a few details, such as the mechanism (no spoiler here..) for igniting the fireworks!

Too bad much of the interesting discussion is already in this news item.

My gf got me one of the AR.Drones for christmas, and I have to say that it is, by far, the best nerd toy I've ever had. Seriously, it's remarkable.

If you, at all, are thinking about getting one go for it. You'll love it.

How's the durability?

I've definitely rammed it into a wall or some other barrier a couple dozen times and it's still ok. I'm sure I'll end up having to replace a blade at some point but I hear this is relatively straight forward.

AR.Drone seems also quite hackable, there is even an open source controller client for Maemo&MeeGo:

http://mardrone.garage.maemo.org/

When we think about drones we talk a lot about military operations. Sometimes I hear stuff on rescue but the theme is usually "tasks dangerous for people." I thought it would be interesting to think 100 years in the future when drones permeate everyday life and are used for the routine and mundane also. What will drones be doing then? I'd like to hear some of HN's most clever, outrageous, imaginative, but mostly, entertaining ideas. :-)

When the drones come marching in we'll have domestic drones (like those agile quadropters). They'll live and charge up on the top shelf, periodically taking off to photograph our stuff so it can be recognised and indexed. Easier to find car keys and books.

And maybe we could use them outside to clear the guttering (that's got to be worth $100 a year).

There's already a gutter clearing robot.

http://store.irobot.com/family/index.jsp?ab=CMS_IRBT_100909&...

A large quadrotor to deliver this to the gutter would be very useful, though.

I have to say, when I first saw the embedded video I was sure I was looking at some augmented reality game for the iPhone. The video from the drone's perspective is close to mind-blowing. There is so many possibilities for drones like these...let's just hope we choose the applications wisely.

Yeah I know - probably little ARM chips are light enough and cheap enough to do the image processing shown, on-board, although whether that was actually done live or added after in the video, who knows.

Don't miss the video at the bottom!

This is the coolest tech video I have ever seen.

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