Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range | Hacker News Reader

Bug drone for UK army that weights 196g, has 40 mins autonomy and 2km range

baesystems.com

Hmm...from a tech porn perspective it’s a cool little gadget. But given the shadow surveillance and police state that was erected post 9/11 and how often “national security” outfits have been caught playing fast and loose with the laws of the land, there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

Governments in most western countries have thrown out habeas corpus and have given themselves the right to indefinitely ‘disappear’ anyone they arbitrarily deem a threat to national security. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden come to mind.

I wouldn’t trust governments and intelligence services in the post-democratic west with this technology any more than I’d trust their counterparts in “classic” totalitarian states.

This is just ridiculous. Why if you were going to illegally spy on people would you use a highly visible and noisy drone when the vast majority of the population live in urban areas where CCTV cameras are common and phone lines conveniently run out to steel covers in the streets (and the entire population is carrying GPS enabled tracking devices full of security flaws?)

There's "oh no our liberties" but that train came and went and this particular device has nothing to do with it.

It's not either-or.

I'm not overly worried by what the government plans to do with this tech, more than any other tech they use for nefarious purposes.

I _am_ worried by the endgame of publicly available drone tech though, because it's very difficult to see how technically or legislatively we can avoid a future with tiny untraceable drones with long battery lives, that record audio and video and can go anywhere. The arms race that is going to be necessary to secure your home and workplace against these is going to be very expensive and ugly, and many people are going to have to settle with every conversation and sexual encounter they have being in public, if only for the lulz.

Privacy, like the fight against piracy, isn't going to be defeated because it's desirable or not, but rather just because the technology and temptation is inevitable.

It's basically a camo DJI Mini that probably costs fifty times as much.

Cute little drone, the Mini. I keep having to tell myself I don't need one.

Indeed. And while we're at it take things to their logical conclusion; seriously consider the implications of this tek + combined with 'AI' for not only navigation but for policing decisions.

When you remove the human element from policing, there is thus then no human empathy in the decision to use force ie- to arrest or kill, if that is the 'command' said AI internally commands itself to do.

>Governments in most western countries have thrown out habeas corpus and have given themselves the right to indefinitely ‘disappear’ anyone they arbitrarily deem a threat to national security. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden come to mind.

Neither of those seem to be examples of habeas corpus being thrown out. Neither were "disappeared" and the court systems were used against Assange and nothing has happened to Snowden as of yet except for the legal system being used to try to keep him from earning money from his book.

Whoa that's a bit of a US Centric broad brush there. "Most Western Countries" - there's more to the West than the US, UK and less than half a dozenish who have or are doing that. I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.

> I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.

How would you know? The point of disappearing people is that they disappear, and you don't know how.

The OP’s claim was that governments have given themselves the right to disappear people. That’s a legal change which couldn’t be done without the standard public process. Also, in general, when people are arbitrarily detained or disappeared, the outside world does hear about it, even in highly authoritarian regimes (see eg the Amnesty website for plenty of examples).

US agencies operate in "Most Western Countries".

- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44313905

- https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP/...

- https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...

- https://theintercept.com/2015/09/28/death-athens-rogue-nsa-o...

> I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.

True, but that's comparable only if these countries had the same responsibilities (it's like comparing people, say a soldier vs a librarian). Ireland for instance has no Air Force, and has to call on the RAF to provide air defence (as it happened when Russian Tu-95s intruded). Likewise, the rest of Europe relies entirely on NATO's firepower against Russian belligerence.

You can certainly shape a better society internally and have equitable social justice if you're free from the distraction of having to defend against external aggression.

> Likewise, the rest of Europe relies entirely on NATO's firepower against Russian belligerence.

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "Russian belligerence"? Do you have some example of Europe relying on NATO's firepower against it?

NATO is seen as a deterrent to Russian expansion into the old Soviet territories as some of the states that are now democracies have joined NATO.

In the absence of a European defence infrastructure like NATO that's pretty much all they have.

Russian belligerence being invading the Baltic states. Crimea and eastern Ukraine were less clear cut than supposed for historical reasons but many in the East live in fear of the same happening to them.

But how is NATO not a military force? It’s kind of equivalent to the US military (except it includes them)... EU is similar to United States. Both are unions of independent states

Ireland does have an Air Force, called the Irish Air Corps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Air_Corps

None of what you say aligns with disappearing people. NATO can easily do its role without that. In fact you can argue that NATO states like US/UK/Turkey which have disappeared people are very unlikely to do it against peer adversaries like Russia, China etc because of the risk of blow back. It's far more common to it to groups deemed as terrorist, Latin American countries etc.

Similarly countries like Sweden and Japan are well armed and not in the business of disappearing people.

That's a very broad interpretation of disappearance and I don't agree with it. NATO isn't in the business of disappearing people either - Assange and Snowden have not disappeared. But Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has disappeared. Kidnapped when he was 6 years old by agents of the CCP and nobody knows where he is now, although China officially says he's doing well.

By painting with such broad strokes, we are comparing entirely different types of actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappeared_(Northern_Ireland)

Eh yes that's the UK as I mentioned.

The people doing the dissappearing were from Ireland though.

>there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

I'd say there's a 100% certainty this will happen.

There are probably bigger worries in the surveillance area already (smartphones etc). I’d be more concerned about their potential use for assassination. How heavy does a bomb have to be?

Assassination of whom? The result isn't exactly discreet, it's not going to be used locally to target inconvenient persons in the UK. If we're talking about conflicts, then I don't see how it's better or worse than a predator.

What if you wanted to kill a foreign head of state and not to reveal who did it? Would this be easier to hide than with a Predator?

There are much easier methods to hide than a drone. They typically use vulnerable or compromised individuals with no paper trial back to the perputrators to do these sorts of assassinations.

Drones are fucking loud, and the video stream can be detected while transmitted via the air (with an sdr card or something similar). Signals can also be jammed, and combined with gps jamming, the drone will "get lost", and probably land at its current location (and hopefully not just drop out of the sky when the batteries are empty).

And this is not james bond level of knowledge and equipment, but something a better ham radio operator or a better engineering student can do with sme preparation.

> And this is not james bond level of knowledge and equipment, but something a better ham radio operator or a better engineering student can do with sme preparation.

I suppose there are not that many engineering students or ham radio operators in the poorer parts of the cities, where I for myself think that these things will first be used internally. At least video-cameras you can try and bring them down with simple rocks [1] or by cutting the electricity down on that pole (that is if they're not battery-powered), not so easy with these type of machines.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=74&v=E1ABR4UpDSU&feature=you...

Yeah it’s designed for the battlefield so amongst all the bangs it’ll most definitely go unnoticed

This is hardly surveillance technology.

Yes it's a camera drone for the military. Big deal. It's also extremely noisy.

The government can put cameras wherever and on whatever platform it damnwell wants - and is allowed to. Really the only way to control the consequences is to restrict those places, platforms and what is done with the data, through laws and regulations. You know, like in a democracy.

If that's not possible, a camera on a particularly cute drone is the least of your problems.

> there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

These things and considerably smaller were fielded 10 years ago by the US; you could bid on SBIR contracts to remedy some of their defects.

I work with nano-UAVs. I am very skeptical that the 40 minute flight time is even close to being real.

Especially with a quadcopter design. They are way to inefficient.

That's because of the energy density (per mass) of Li-Ion batteries. You basically hit a wall at 20 minutes that's very hard to push past (it almost feels like a law of physics).

But maybe they're using non-rechargeable batteries: zinc-air or lithium-iron-disulfide (ie. a 'lithium' AA battery) or something else? Trade offs are different for military.

The amount of batteries soldiers need to carry is ridiculous; a 72 hour patrol load out includes up to 25 lbs of batteries already!

Yes but there are no convenient charging points, if the battery runs out then you need to replace it, not charge it. All the more reason to throw used batteries away (they’re cheap and it’s less to carry).

Military radio batteries are typically rechargable and they are heavy.

Based on the info sheet "A quick change battery" would suggest they went for the non-rechargeable route.

I don't think it necessarily means non-rechargeable. Since charging usually takes a long time, generally in the field you carry a bunch of batteries charged ahead of time and swap them as needed.

The classic example of a good military-only battery would be those using molten salts as an electrolyte (typically at 150-500 ºC) [1]. Very high energy density (around 74 Ahr/kg [2] compared to LiPo's ~50 Ahr/kg [3]) and very high power density. Not finger friendly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_battery [2] https://global-sei.com/technology/tr/bn76/pdf/76-06.pdf [3] https://blog.ampow.com/lipo-battery-size-chart/

If one could make such a battery small enough for this drone, I expect you would need all its power to keep the salt molten.

Don't a lot of the DJI models have a ~30 minute flight time? Point taken though, that there's a wall we hit with current battery tech.

The DJI drones that can do that are significantly larger. A 250 gram DJI mavic mini can do 30 minutes and with significantly larger propellers.

The efficiency goes down with smaller blade sizes (more losses to vortexes) so from the photo 20 min is the max to expect with regular lipo batteries.

The Mini 2 manages 31 minutes at 249g and it features a 3 axis gimbal for the camera. This military drone doesn't appear to have any gimbal.

Nitpick: plural of vortex should be vortices.

It actually appears both spellings are currently accepted in dictionaries, but in the fluid dynamics literature you will essentially only find "vortices", so that's a much better (more searchable) word to use.

41 minutes of spirited flying with hobby components weighing under 250g:

https://youtu.be/u2v1QLmhNxM

There's no reason to use rechargeables so if non chargeables give them a extra 30% then that would be how they are doing it.

But it will just be off the shelf batteries, so they would exist already on ebay if that's what they are doing.

I dont find it that unbelievable, there are a number of youtube videos of hobbyist grade quadcopters with what I believe are larger motors running 20-30 minutes on a pair of 18650 cells albeit without any autonomous capability.

https://youtu.be/BOZStU-QCSc

Hahah that's fantastic, how that thing even takes off with a 1S2P 18650 I'll never know. That's 100 grams just for the batteries.

It's all about the cube-square law, the same reason a butterfly can remain airborne for hours or days on a few milligrams of chemical energy.

Getting RC aircraft to fly in the more laborious, sedate manner of a full-size aircraft instead of like an insect fluttering through the wind is something of a challenge for scale model builders. When you build an airframe around tiny batteries as a design constraint, expectations from larger aircraft don't carry over well.

Sure, but I'm an RC aircraft builder so my expectations are calibrated for that. Motors that small have a hard time lifting 180g at 1S.

I haven't looked into this drone in depth, but I think it may be feasible. The DJI Mini2, which any civilian can buy for $449, has a similar size, weighs 249g, and advertises a flight time of 30 minutes. (In my experience with the Mini 1, it's plausible).

Side note: the DJI Mini 1 is an excellent drone -- stable flight, great camera, and great range. I wouldn't be surprised if it outperforms this 'Bug' drone by most metrics, except for the critical (at least for military purposes) "not being made by a Chinese company" metric.

It's hard to express how awesome the Mini is. IMO it's an underappreciated technological achievement at the once-in-a-hundred-years level. Only a few years ago, it was hard to get a decent digital camera for $400 and change. The Mini is a decent camera that also happens to fly.

When that realization hit me, it reminded me of the first time I saw a $29 DVD player for sale at WalMart. Some incredible things had to happen to make that possible, almost all of of them going completely unnoticed by almost everyone.

The BAE drone probably costs $50,000 apiece, and doesn't appear to be substantially different from the current-generation (or even the original) Mini.

And the $29 DVD player often had more features than the $200 ones, especially the ability to play other regions discs.

I have to concur. I built many drones with 400$+ flight controllers that look like trash next to my mini 2.

Which drone flight controllers cost $400+??

Apologies as I was ambiguous here. I find myself including both the GPS and flight controller computer/ carrier board in that 400$ price tag. I’m using Hex Cube Orange with Here gps units. This says nothing of cameras, radios, batteries, flight time, and live camera feed/control.

"The BAE drone probably costs $50,000 apiece"

That may be a little high. UAVTek's site says they beat the FLIR Black Hornet 3 bid[1]. Estimates based on US Army budget requests say the Black Hornet 3 is coming in between $15k and $16k per unit[2]. Probably still 5 figures though.

[1] https://uavtek.co.uk/news/uk-mod-acquire-latest-nano-drone-t...

[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26359/the-pocket-sized...

In addition you have to think of the trade-offs. If the army multiplied the price by 10 to get 10% better performance, that might save a soldier’s life.

Hmm, shades of Kipling‘s Frontier Arithmetic: “four thousand pounds of education/Drops to a ten-rupee jezail”....

That’s based on the value of the whole contract, which will include the costs of participating in trials, demonstrations, training, lifetime service and spare parts. There are likely to be a whole team of personnel dedicated full time to the contract for years, all included.

I have both the Mini and the Mini2. The mini2 is even more impressive. Better camera, better batteries, longer range.

I flew mine today in -15ºC for 35 minutes, and managed a range of 3km.

It's crazy.

It says autonomy, not flight time. They may intend this thing to land and remain active as a remote camera for much ot its mission.

In the article there is an image that says "flight times in excess of 40 minutes".

They're claiming flight time - in the battery section of the infographic it claims "flight times of more than 40 minutes".

Tri-blade props are not the most efficient - we use them in racing applications because we want to generate maximum thrust and we don't need more than around 2-3 minutes per battery but we wouldn't use them in an aerial photo rig where we want long flight times - 2 blade props would be the go to. Also the pitch of those blades in the photo are quite aggressive.

I wonder if they have different configurations - as photographed I can easily believe the 50mph top speed with small but high kv (fast but inefficient) motors but I'd expect a different configuration for longer flight times.

From the photo it looks like the battery compartment is shaped for 2 cylinders, its about the right dimensions for 2x 18650 cells but it's impossible to say for sure. That would give up to 8000mah of 3.7v (1S2P configuration) or 4000mah at 7.4v (2s1p). They could be using different chemistry though, e.g. I usually fly LiHV cells which have a higher nominal voltage in the same pack size & weight - you do get very slightly more watt hours out of those packs (not as much as the numbers would suggest).

The given all up weight looks plausible based on the size of what's shown and the weight of 2 cells.

In a military context, "flight" can mean "mission". I only suggest that something may have been lost in the language. I find that easier to believe than this thing hovering over a battlefield for 40 minutes.

On the other hand if it includes significant landed time as a fixed cam, 40 minutes seems miserably short.

Drone racer here, too! 18650s are amazing as far as power density is concerned.

Here's a guy who takes a 3" 1S quad, adapts an 18650 and gets 29 minutes of flight time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOZStU-QCSc

There's a few others, and in fact I considered doing this myself! But, I'd get bored of slowbelly 'flying' after about 15 minutes. I like to go fast.

I completely believe 40mins of flight time if you had actual resources to assign to this. Imagine using the 18650 as the frame and strapping motors to sticks, or other crazy ideas to bring weight down and time up.

Since you seem to have some expertise in this area, I am going to use the opportunity to ask a bit of a diagonal question I've wondered for a while:

I've seen claims about increase in airflow from bladeless fan designs (I know it's a bit of misnomer, as the blades are just hidden) for home applications. Is there a reason bladeless designs haven't been used in the UAV realm? I assumed the claims were just marketing, or the weight increase offsets the effeciency, or something like that, but thought I would ask.

Well out of my wheel house unfortunately but i do know that “air multiplier” marketing speak is called something like the coanda effect.

A Tom Stanton video with his coanda effect quadcopter https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Irp_vnmUWZ4

are you talking about ducted fans? if so I've wondered the same thing. here's a plausible answer: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/36726/why-dont-....

The ducting 'shadows' the blade during forward flight, massively reducing efficiency. During hover they can help though.

It says "a quick change battery provides flight times of 40 minutes or more".

In other words, not on a single battery/charge.

Unlikely. It also directly says 40 minute battery life. If changes extended it, it would be unlimited.

One thing people are not discarding is cost.

Given cost is not a problem, is it possible to get 40m flying time using exotic battery and ultra high strength/weight ratio materials?

I feel like the cost is deeply embedded in our psyche and people are comparing a military nano drone with DJI mini2 with entirely different engineering envelopes to work in.

DJI mini2 is made in thousands if not millions of quantities. There is so much cost optimizing. Even turning a part around is optimized because that’s more time to assemble.

I agree the photos are probably just mockups. No way they would be using that sort of prop. That said, Li-FES2 primary cells (at 400Wh/kg) have well over twice the energy density to LiPo/LCO rechargables (at 190 Wh/kg). If I can make a custom 7" bi-blade quadcopter fly for 30 minute, 40 minutes is doable with better battery density.

In my own builds it is much easier to get long flight times with larger props but that is probably on account of the lesser need for exotic material science at larger scales.

> I agree the photos are probably just mockups

The article makes it sound like they've got a whole bunch of these in active use by the Army (albeit for testing), so it'd seem a little odd to have a picture of a mockup. Maybe, I guess, but I'd have the assumption be that this is the real thing.

Here's a hobby drone getting 41 minutes of spirited flying, with live HD feed, and it only weighs 50g more: https://youtu.be/u2v1QLmhNxM

Having played a little with micro-drones as a hobbyist, the ability to have an "eye in the sky" is amazing. Just today, we got a little turned around on a hike -- in less than a minute I was able to see our location from above and which direction to bushwhack a shortcut back to the main trail. I can see how this would be invaluable in a "strategic" situation.

Even the tiny ones are noisy and give away their position immediately. The effective range is relatively short, so you know if there's a drone, the operator is nearby. Weather is a limiting factor -- winds will tax the battery, and rain or wet snow will effectively disable them.

I wonder what counter-methods will be used against drones in the field. Really accurate markspeople? Portable EMPs? From what I've read, around airports etc they've been experimenting with enforcing no-fly zones with birds of prey!

I'd take a shotgun over a marksman. Buckshot is designed for objects in this size range.

Buckshot is designed for killing "medium to large game" like... bucks. Maybe you mean birdshot?

Erm... Yes. Slip of the brain.

Trained eagles and hawks are already used to keep airports and shopping malls safe from unwanted birds anyway, so it just yet another target to deal with.

Drones are integral to current warfare and will continue to become even more important. And as we've seen in the Caucuses, the nations with the most effective drones will easily conquer other countries without or with worse drones.

Aside from that, we've come really far with drones which are amazing technology-wise. We have small drones like these with a 2km-range and large drones that can carry huge payloads, i.e. payloads in the tons of kg, while also having ranges in the thousands of kilometres. Although it is remarkable technology-wise, I believe it foreshadows a horrible future for humans that we have such advanced murder weapons. And especially now that drones have become cheap to produce.

Compared to nuclear and biological weapons, drones don't get my pulse up.

A future where terrorist groups can produce their own weapons of mass destruction seems like it may well be on the horizon. Through exponential improvements in the underlying technology. Crispr for biology and laser based uranium enrichment for nuclear.

I think it's entirely possible that the great filter might be ahead of us and might consist of our own weapons exceeding our ability to manage them responsibly.

Happy New Year all!

Hundreds of thousands of autonomous drone killbots the size of bats flying around do get my pulse up.

Why do this when you can gas a bunch of people or blow them up old school for way cheaper? Not sold

Harder to do at range.

I'm glad I'm not the Secret Service. A drone swarm has to be rapidly becoming one of their scary scenarios for something like inaugurations.

A single medium-caliber mortar is a five-hundred-year-old piece of technology that can be carried and assembled by two men, has an effective range of ~1,000 to 5,000 yards, does not require line of sight to the target, can be operated by a high-school dropout, and has a kill radius of 30 meters.

One can probably be picked up from an army surplus warehouse somewhere in the former Soviet Union/(some current conflict zone), for an ~$X,000 USD bribe, or alternatively, manufactured by a literate, mildly motivated individual with a high tolerance for personal risk, a welder, a lathe, a tool-shed, and an outhouse in the mountains.

Given that we live in a world where gunpowder has been invented, you will have to pardon me if I'm more concerned about the dangers of lunatics with mundane explosives, and delivery systems thereof.

Mortar is hard to aim (even with modern aids), in a terrain that you haven't ranged already.

With a cell phone and Google Maps, you can get distance, elevation, obstacles, and more with good-enough precision.

Or, even use our own mission planning software against us - ATAK[1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Team_Awareness_Kit

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atakmap.ap...

Yes, these are the kind of modern aids I mentioned. You're still likely to miss your first one.

Mortar is not a precision weapon, it's a Monte Carlo prop.

Does it need to be a precision weapon to be a weapon of terror?

And with a kill zone of 20-30 meters... you can miss by quite a lot and still do a ton of damage.

Sure, but in the context of assassinating the VIP it does.

Mortar attacks for this are not unprecedented†, but are not terribly effective.

[†] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_mortar_attack#T...

For an assassination of a specific target - even with military equipment and technology, it would be dubious to use a mortar. They simply are not precision weapons, as you already pointed out.

But, for inflicting terror and great loss of life in a populated area - they could be used very effectively.

Any particular reason someone couldn't build a steerable mortar? It wouldn't take much in the way of gas jets to do the job.

You can do all sorts of guided munitions with all kinds of weapons, but then the simplicity vs drone attack point is kinda moot.

Thanks for joining me on whatever list we are now on :)

Expert disruptive innovators, the Irish Republican Army, repeatedly proved this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=IRA+%22mortar+at...

Amongst other things, shooting down a helicopter, and having a go, separately, at the queen and the prime minister.

And yet, fairly skilled operators in Afghanistan and Iraq still regularly miss American forward operating bases and their fixed buildings with them.

We don't live in a James Bond movie, any non-state actor who wants to kill people will have a much easier time of doing something incredibly boring and mundane, like buying an automatic weapon, or building a bomb.

You are vastly underestimating the difficulty of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of anything in secrecy.

Sure but even then, those groups could use these long-ranged and relatively cheap drones to deliver all those horrific weapons. Huge rockets and such is fortunately prohibitively expensive and hard to manage. Whereas drones compared to rockets, are much cheaper and easier to manage could easily substitute those rockets and they would also probably be able to evade our defensive systems. For example, Turkish drones destroying Russian anti-air defense in the Armenian/Azerbajian war.

> "It was the only nano-UAV able to cope with the uncompromising weather during a recent Army Warfighting Experiment (AWE) event"

I hadn't thought too much about how UAVs of any class will need to cope with adverse weather conditions. Seems like that will become an even larger variable in military planning, as UAVs etc. become more prevalent.

E.g. it might be hard to totally replace a manned surveillance platform with an unmanned system, if the manned system is 'all-weather capable' and the unmanned is not.

The recent Azerbaijan-Armenia war saw extensive use of UAVs, and yes, weather (e.g. fog in the mountains or the lack of it) was an important factor mostly because of its impact on UAV usage.

It feels like they're paying ludicrous money for these. Can someone in the know explain what differentiates these from shop-bought or scratch-built drones?

As per this article below, the Nano 1A UAV Quadcopter Bug drone sells for £4,500 (a tenth of the price of another model, the Black Hornet Nano):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/drone-nano-b...

I appreciate that this is probably a variation on the old canard that goes "I could have written that government software in a weekend", but it does seem pricey.

It's probably because of the low volume. They've only sold 30 so far, and the R&D costs need to be recovered.

If the selling point is stability in a storm, then the differentiation is in software, which is interesting. You'd expect the price of things like this to tumble.

One could imagine great dark clouds of these things in battle over perhaps Eastern Europe or the South China Sea in ten years' time.

And roving cities assigning tickets for illegal parking and all manner of other infractions.

My guess it is built with military grade components which are more expensive and has got embedded emphasis on reliability. That probably includes custom molds that can be insanely expensive for small runs. I can imagine the firmware must conform to a higher standards than consumer grade firmware.

[x] Doubt

I've built dozens of multirotors and you can clearly see AMAXinno motors on the thing, (https://uavtek.co.uk/uav-fleet/bug) plus the big bulging 18650s. 99.9% chance it's using a COTS multirotor firmware or some variant of Ardupilot, and the camera looks like an old-school analog FPV camera. From the specs sounds like they have it running on the 5.8Ghz ISM band, so the thing will fall out of the sky the instant it encounter interference from some poorly configured consumer electronics.

From the article:

"It boasts a stealthy low visual profile and the ability to fly even in strong winds of more than 50mph. It was the only nano-UAV able to cope with the uncompromising weather during a recent Army Warfighting Experiment (AWE) event hosted by the Ministry of Defence’s Future Capability Group."

> It boasts a stealthy low visual profile

The one in the article's picture looks like a flying brick. A lot of money to be made in this field - there's a low barrier to entry in the market.

The problem as I see it is that many, many people have the skills to compete, but not the capital. And often are working so much that they don't have spare energy to invest every weekend for years to build an MVP.

I know some will say that sounds like making excuses, but the examples I've seen of entrepreneurs have been people who haven't actually had to work very hard at their day jobs. They aren't totally burned out at the end of the day.

I wish I knew a way to fix this situation. The economy could operate far more efficiently than it is, and that would be better for all of us.

Your comment should be made into article or at least maybe some question on economic stack-overflow. I too don't know solution yet. There are many people who have an idea, but many of those ideas will just fail because it's not sustainable or there are better ways already. The biggest problem is discovering those best ideas from noise. Some dedicated think tanks of specialists disseminating ideas would be best, but currently there is simply too much noise to filter.

"Army Warfighting Experiment (AWE) event hosted by the Ministry of Defence’s Future Capability Group."

I wonder who was allowed to attend... And how those were selected....

You need to separate R&D amortization from marginal price, otherwise you're deep in "ask a silly question, get a silly answer" territory.

Unless you're DJI the volume isn't high enough to just look at marginal price.

There's maybe $300 of off-the-shelf components (at retail prices) in the pictured air unit. It's the R&D time. The software dev and testing of the the whole system would be super expensive. Also there's no mention of their ground station design, how is it controlled by the operator, there's a lot of money and research that has to go into that half of the problem. Soldiers wont put up with the operational peculiarities that hobbyist will. Drones are incredibly fragile because of the weight limitations. 40 minutes of flight time is amazing, probably 2x the best time a hobbyist could build with off-the-shelf parts at that size class.

It's a toothpick drone with two 18650 batteries on it, I doubt it costs more than $100. There's video above of a hobbyist doing the same thing. I don't know how autonomous this one is, but most quadcopters nowadays run STM32F4 processors, so, as you say, the software would be what's expensive.

I don't know for sure what's inside this drone, but it's probably because they had to pay for developing and building a custom small drone. I suspect DJI or Autel can build better drones at a far lower price, but the UK military probably does not want to rely on a Chinese company for their drones.

Maybe they've could have turned to Parrot, which is French? Or maybe even that would not be desirable, especially after Brexit.

Shop bought drones don't have arbitrary, often nonsense requirements. This one advertises that it'll work in 50MPH winds. How common are soldiers dealing with combat in 50MPH winds? It's likely there are other, similarly arbitrary and nonsensical demands that were placed on these.

Arguably one of the main differences between defence and consumer tech is dealing with the 'oh come on how often...'

You don't want to be caught needing your X or calling off operation Y because conditions are unfavourable.

It's kind of Pareto principle I suppose - they'll pay (say) 80% for that last rarer 20% of operational feasibility. (Likely more like 95-5, but I mention 80-20 as it's basically an 'aka' for Pareto.)

If you're fighting an opponent whose drones can only handle 40 mph winds, you might try to do as much combat at 50 mph as possible.

How many actual historical battles or skirmishes have been fought in gale force winds?

Those wars are over. You have to be ready for the next war.

Operating nearby to helicopters may be feasible

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines

"If you look at historical data, the vast majority of battle-winners used pre-modern weaponry"

"Thanks to the machine-learning algorithms, the robot apocalypse was short-lived"

I looked at the cost, 45k GBP each and thought "that seems like a steal compared to US Defense prices".

Is it just me, or does the pictured drone shell look 3d printed?

There is for sure money to be made for any (ABCA based) company to sell minorly tweaked clones of popular consumer drones.

You're not kidding, the outershell looks like it has signs of either tool marks or 3dprinting artifacts.

The higher resolution shots on the manufacturer website look more like it's coated with something.

https://uavtek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bug-Nano-1A-...

https://uavtek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bug-Nano-Ima...

Two thought triggered by this article.

1: What alternative designs for quadcopter would be viable for small drones? Some lighter-than-air quality? I assume the complexity involved in making a helicopter collective would be too heavy. Is it really quadcopters all the way down?

2: Why not smaller? Would an even smaller drone be unfeasible due to battery weight and square/cube law issues? What's stopping us from gram-scale drones? Presumably the interaction with the air would create new problems and things to take advantage of.

Interesting idea to fill a drone with helium, then presumably it could have smaller motors or longer flight time.

Or have wings.

A drone could be launched with a disposable helium balloon and remain silent until it needed to maneuver. Rotational maneuvers to aim a camera would be brief and quiet compared to hovering. On a calm night you might even be able to get it back quietly.

Went down this rabbit hole once, you'll need too much helium volume to make any difference.

There's plenty of multirotor VTOL drone designs out there, which combine the practicality of vertical take-off and landing (hence, "VTOL") with the greater efficiency of wings for longer range flight. Many proof-of-concept delivery drones I've seen are of this kind.

re: size, you can definitely make smaller drones. There's plenty of cute and surprisingly flyable drones out there that are less than 6 cm in diameter, some even with cameras. However, there's a few drawbacks at smaller sizes:

- Less power. They can fly fine indoors, but they'll be swept away by any strong winds. - Less space for electronics/camera and batteries, so image quality and flight time will suffer.

Once things get small wings and propellers get much less efficient. For really small drones people are looking for inspiration amongst insects so lots of flapping.

Attach the mini-drone to a helium filled ... red balloon (just to rhyme with the well-known song), or some better tactical color.

This would somewhat alleviate the energy expenditure to maintain lift and prolong the flight time. The motors may selectively cut off based on present state of inertia. This may be all possible due to relatively small weight of such drones. Sure this would preclude operation in storm winds.

It's a question of mission requirements. Drones of these sizes are more like a floating/hidden eye/ear than anything of direct offense. Besides, it does not need to transmit at all, just record and deliver back on homing beacon.

I think another issue with the balloon would be helium leakage, having tanks and the ability to refill them on hand, fill valves etc adding weight. Not deal breakers, but complicators. I think your point is more direct, although I wonder why something like this wouldn't be appropriate for surveillance of a fixed area etc.

re 1: I doubt weight is the main concern with a helicopter style drone. I've seen some palm-sized hobbyist helis at the local field. I'd guess durability is the larger concern. a quad with fixed rotors can take some pretty rough landings and still be good to go. the variable pitch mechanisms are much more delicate.

"Although the Army is seeking a mini-drone for use by individual squads through the Soldier Borne Sensors (SBS) program, the individually handmade Black Hornet is seen as too expensive for large-scale deployment, with a unit costing as much as US$195,000"

But just the fact that this exists at any price means that it will eventually become ubiquitous, unless something even smaller and more capable takes its place. That price was in 2016, so who knows if it's already down to $100k or below. In 10-20 years, these things will be priced like laptops and be far more capable than the current models.

They've probably trimmed the price somewhat since 2016: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26359/the-pocket-sized...

That is the cutest drone!

I have one of these https://www.eachine.com/EACHINE-E10W-Mini-Quadcopter-Wifi-FP..., which is roughly the same size.

It has a functional camera which records to a micro SD card. The image quality is crap, but you can't expect much at $29.

I have searched around a bit, but could not recognize the motors. Here is the best picture available, in which we can clearly see graphical content that would only be on commercial motors[0].

One of the other drone made by the same company uses Align motors[1], taken from a picture[2]. Those are however not used for this bug drone.

[0]: https://uavtek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Bug-Nano-Ima... [1]: http://www.align.com.tw/en/ [2]: https://uavtek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/hex-Mini-1C-...

https://de.amaxshop.com/index.php?route=product/product&prod...

Nothing special.

Thanks. It seems to be the 2550kv version. Here are some numbers about it[0]. It might hover at idle if I read this correctly.

I don't see how they do it at 196g though. 4 * 31.6 + 2 * 47.5 = 221.4g, with 47.5g being the weight of one 18650, as this is what seems to be inside (weight of a Sony VTC6 taken from [0]). The energy density would have to be a lot better than this, I don't know a thing about non-rechargeable batteries as suggested by others in this thread.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2v1QLmhNxM

The last thing we need in the world messed up by Covid and the military industrial complex is more war machines and normalisation of meaningless wars (all of which have an undertone of neo-colonialism, where we use buzzwords to justify our acts by painting the other side as less of a human).

We could use the technology though, in solving real problems.

Introducing the counter-strike drone. Analysing the streamed data of the surveilance drone, triangulating the source of the control signal and launching a projectile to take it out. Never has been peace & quiet more easy.

These should be autonomous and able to do surveillance of an area by pre-programmed routes or loitering. Most transmission will be from the drone to the operator in that case. If you intend to do active control, you should be ready to move since your position is exposed.

The more autonomous the drone is, the less transmission you'll need. If you are looking for a specific type of vehicle for example, it should be easy to have the drone do it autonomously and not even transmit anything itself until it finds it (and possibly never - it could keep the footage until it returns to the operator). A drone (or a dozen of them) asked to find enemy armor within a map area with zero commincation either to or from the drone would be extremely difficult to hide from. This is a capability that has existed for years with large drones or satellites but they have been expensive, limited use in bad weather, and most importantly not available to individual soldiers on the ground without needing to coordinate that support.

> launching a projectile to take it out

The problem with anti-drone weapons is that so long as the projectile is heavier/larger/more expensive than the drone, the drone is winning even when taken out. It's an active area of research but other than another drone, the only viable BVR counter-drone I have seen so far is a trained bird...

Reminds me of Prey by Michael Crichton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(novel).

(from Wikipedia): "The novel serves as a cautionary tale about developments in science and technology; in this case, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and distributed artificial intelligence."

Autonomous flying drone army you say? what could possibly go wrong?

Speaking of tiny army drones and Electric Sheep Comix (yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549042), I am reminded of Patrick's series The Spiders: https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/spiders/

Am I the only one that felt a wave of relief when opening the article and seeing that the drone was palm sized and not actually bug sized?

I’ve been meaning to procure a drone to scout best trails before hiking them, and DJI mini 2 seem ideal for the purpose.

All I need now is a phone app that would make it easy to browse the tiles shot by the drone (rather than rewind video back and forth).

Any suggestions?

Please don’t. I strongly dislike getting buzzed by drones when out in the wild or even just in a park.

Cool! Almost makes me forget that BAE Systems defrauded the American public by bribing Michael Chertoff to buy full body scanners from BAE Systems for $3B. Chertoff then joined BAE Systems as a Chairman of the Board.

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/chertoff-joins-defe...

https://www.aofs.org/2010/04/12/secretary-michael-chertoff-b...

Small point to make but I wonder how things like these are integrated into a typical infantry structure? Are they a section, platoon or company level tool? Do they sit with the platoon commander? Having them with Corporals may make sense though that may be too far forward and lose some benefits plus overload them in contact. At the same time they could be very useful in a number of scenarios. I read somewhere the US Marines are testing adding a systems operator to be beside the Signaller in Platon HQ.

I'd be super curious to know how loud they are, main problem I see with drones being stealthy is they also tend to be quite noisy.

These small drones are hard to hear and see when they fly high enough (say 200m)

but the camera is pointing forward so I don't think that it is their plan

Pretty impressive, I got 30min in 2015. Nobody at the time wanted to buy it though. Do people want to see the video?

Do you think they built custom batteries or got something off the shelf? If off the shelf which pack do you think it is?

Picture looks like two 18650's or the likes of.

I wonder if battlefields of the future will feature kamikaze bug drones.

They already feature missile carrying ones.

Bug? More like a bird.

Reminds me of the DJI Mavic Mini. How much does it cost?

I have the Mavic Mini 1.

It weighs 249g (which is 27% more than this drone).

It also realistically only flies for about 15-20 minutes before needing a recharge, which is half as much as this drone.

So while similar to the Mavic Mini, I think it's clear they're not in the same league.

Note that the cutoff for some regulations in the US is 250g.

https://fpvfc.org/sub-250g-regulations

They are probably also not in the same price range.

for 199 you can get https://www.racedayquads.com/collections/all-pre-built-quads...

close to 1 to 2 mile range (depending on obstructions) 30 min battery as long as your not freestyleing lol. (assuming you have everything else for it. a decent starter set up is close to 200/300 dollars but is compatable with any drone you can stick a rx in)

No camera, and no camera mount included

So once you do, you blow past the 250g limit, and it's in a different class.

It has a builtin camera? You can also upgrade to something like a caddix loris or tarasar and get full 4k and still be under weight.

It can manage the full 31 minutes of flight time if you are just flying at a moderate speed. Curiously hovering over a spot requires slightly more battery

While recording video? I've never seen over 20 mins.

If it could take 50g of cargo, that would be just one run over the border to pay it off, if you know what I mean. I guess cartels would be all over this "bug".

The Dji Mini 2 has a range of up to 6 miles with OcuSync. 239g and about 30min flying time. Quite close to the specs of the BA system.

Pretty big "bugs" they have in the UK, judging by that drone:hand ratio in the pic.

Also provides plastic pollution

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