Swarming drones autonomously navigate a dense forest | Hacker News Reader

Swarming drones autonomously navigate a dense forest

techcrunch.com

111 pointslxm152 comments

Everytime someone says: "Our robot/drone can be used for finding hidden people in hard to reach locations" the cynic in me thinks that these are just codewords for: "Our killbots will revolutionize the urban battlefield. DoD please fund us". Can someone please prove me wrong?

Not obvious if tiny drones pack enough heat to be relevant in an urban battlefield scenario or if they are actually useful compared to conventional approaches.

A swam of tiny drones could easily overwhelm an enemy....

Lots of options. If against personel they just kamikaze in... if against armoured targets a small explosive charge on a hundred or so drones could easily destroy a target.

What if they run against a wall?

Swarm of cheap drones blankets area. When an individual drone finds a target it requests an artillery strike (or similar) on its own location.

There's something about the swarming nature of these things that makes them even more unsettling.

They’re big enough to carry a blinding laser and a computer capable of face recognition.

Expect urban defence to feature a lot of nets in the near future.

Do a Google search for drone propeller injuries. Those are accidental; now envision 20 of them working intentionally to slice you apart with the props.

They don’t really need armament to maim and kill.

I can't prove you wrong I'm afraid, because the only difference between the two is a weapon. But this is the two-sided sword in a lot of technological advancements; advances in medical science can be used to create bioweapons for example; advances in nuclear physics allowed both the nuclear fission and fusion generator, but also the nuke, and spaceflight evolved from long distance missiles and alongside ICBMs, the push was for both scientific and military progress simultaneously.

Slaughterbots was meant to be a video against such technology, but I'm 100% sure there are plenty of companies who are pointing at it and saying "This. Exactly this. This is what we want."

Is it really more terrifying somehow than a guy with a machine gun going and mowing down civilians? Or a maniac in a truck plowing in pedestrians. In effect, the other approaches are a lot more accessible to anyone.

Yes, because it can scale massively and it removes even the chance of a moral reconsideration on the part of the killer. With a human soldier there's at least a chance they'll decide to disobey an order to murder innocent people.

Isn't it the case that only 1 in X soldiers actually fires their weapon ? I think vaguely remember something to that effect.

If you refer to the WW1 claim floating around, then it is most likely false. If you are talking about the fact modern military has many nore support ropes than combat roles, then... yeah, but that tells nothing about the willingness to fire a gun.

Yeah about 8:1 in 2005 for the US

https://acoup.blog/2022/04/22/fireside-friday-april-22-2022/

There's a book on this called On Killing by David Grossman.[1]

"In World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles. In Korea, about 50 percent. In Vietnam, the figure rose to more than 90 percent."

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-S...

I wonder what they start doing after enduring a single artillery barrage in a city. That must be horribly traumatising to see.

I recently came back home from travels and realised that our neighbour’s car burned down(I live in London), and it just struck me how horrible it looks like. That’s after seeing many videos of total destruction in Ukraine. It just never popped into my mind how unusual it is to see something like that.

That wasn’t even people dying, just practical realisation how not far we are from total civilisation collapse, if the majority of citizens wanted that.

How could smart drones scale massively more than firearms and trucks?

If anything, we see from the conflict in Ukraine that keeping smart weapons supplied in a modern conflict it a huge effort that needs a lot of interconnected players.

One person can control, at most, about two guns and one truck at a time.

> One person can control, at most, about two guns and one truck at a time.

A really big gun, or missile (battery)…

This isn't the same problem at all. The weapons we have trouble supplying are huge (howitzer with smart rounds, &c.) and require good roads and rails

You could drop hundreds of autonomous drone by air, make them land somewhere and wait in standby until they get activated or detect a threat.

They scale massively because 1 guy with 100 rifles won't do much more than 1 guy with 1 rifle, 1 guy with 100 trucks won't move faster than 1 guy with 1 truck. 0 guy with 100 drones would potentially kill 100 guys simultaneously for cheap since switchblade style drones are glorified DJIs with a grenade straped at the front

I admit that control has the _possibility_ to scale well. Supply, on the contrary, it would be much harder to maintain.

That's another point in favor of drones: you can skip field maintenance and do it a the home base and deploy/recover them at time of mission, en masse. Human soldiers has to maintain their equipment in the field/forward base - which is a different set of logistical problems

>How could smart drones scale massively more than firearms and trucks?

I suspect we will start seeing the first true drone swarm deployments in Ukraine over the next couple years. The world is simply not ready for how horrifying it will be. These things can be manufactured for a few hundred bucks a piece. Sony can pump out 10 million PlayStations in a few months. What happens when that kind of logistics and manufacturing is applied to kamikaze drones? You get swarms of tens of thousands of them. The entire future of land warfare from this point on will be an arms race between drone swarms. And the swarms will take on combined arms aspects; there will be AA, AT, AP, incendiary, electronic warfare, observation, and hunter-killer variants. Winning wars in the future will consist of choosing the correct size and makeup of your swarm to counter the enemy's capability.

Right now, what spooks you more:

That a person with a gun is coming to kill you

Or there are tiny machines floating outside your windows, in your vents, on your ceiling, ready to stab you with an undetectable poison the instant someone far away pushes a button..

Which do you think you have a better chance of spotting and defending against?

The answer is both are terrifying. If someone with a gun wants you dead, you die. I see no particular reason drones should be more terrifying than the other.

I'm picturing someone having trouble deciding who is the underdog in the original Terminator movie.

Also this:

https://xkcd.com/652/

Do you imagine that having these tiny machines deployed, maintained, and ready to go in disparate locations around the world is any easier than today where we have larger machines deployed, maintained, ready to go, but in fixed locations under tight control? I am more fearful of a missile silo, personally.

I'm pretty sure Slaughterbots was trying to provoke people into building DIY loitering munitions to prove the video wrong. The drones will be expensive, low in capability, can be intercepted (the video simply postulated that they can't be shot down by uh snipers?) and 99% of the time they will be controlled by humans. After all, being wrong on the internet is the best way to get a correct response.

I am honestly more scared of chemical weapons and barrel bombs. You know, things that have actually been confirmed to have devastating impact in Syria.

Somehow the typical hacker news commenter is worried about very precise robotic hit men operating in large groups to be used for indiscriminate killing when WW2 weapons were already enough to wipe out entire cities. You're more likely to have died from the atomic bombs deployed in Nagasaki or Hiroshima than from some tiny plastic drone with a 5 minute flight time.

I mean think about a hypothetical nuclear weapon that kills everyone recognized via facial recognition in a 10 kilometer radius. Most bystanders aren't important enough to have their face on that database.

> Most bystanders aren't important enough to have their face on that database.

If you have a drivers’ license or a passport, you’re in it.

> WW2 weapons were already enough to wipe out entire cities

Indiscriminately. Which gives you a big PR issue. Being able to kill only, say, every military-aged male in a city without touching anyone else is a bit different.

I don't think that would blow over any better for the international community. You'd basically be targeting college students and high schoolers.

Then adjust the criteria to "people who match a face in the hacked database from their military ID system", if you prefer.

What if they just start wearing a balaclava?

Obviously people trying to hide their identity are evil and thus OK to target.

Good luck dealing with balaclava scarecrows if you just target anyone wearing one.

So just target only the ones that are moving! As a side benefit, you get to make this [0] a reality.

But seriously though, there's a lot of heuristics that can be used for "is a target and not a dummy". Will they be perfect? No. But they don't need to be.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm83FTA89AY

Wearing a balaclava would bump the wearer to the highest priority.

That doesn't work if everyone does it.

How many people are genuinely willing to wear something outside knowing that it will get them killed, and knowing that they would NOT be killed if they did not wear that piece of clothing?

there is already research that can reliably identify individuals by their movement patterns

Yes, there is, but none that can reliably do so within 1-2 seconds from a drone going at a few hundred kph. I doubt that there ever will be, either.

The lack of imagination on things like this baffles me. It’s like the folks who dismissed early digital cameras because of the shitty image quality.

You couple the fast drones with slower surveillance ones at higher altitude to identify possible targets. Or pair them with local security cameras, or the victim’s cell phone pings.

Whose to say the gait databases that these things are pulling from can't be fed garbage though

True! It's a bit like thinking people will suddenly start needing more than 64kb RAM or something.

>can be intercepted (the video simply postulated that they can't be shot down by uh snipers?)<

search: >'bird of prey trained to take-down drones'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bird of prey trained to...>

Military drones are already used for assassinations. Making them "autonomous" is only the next step to that.

But, here's the thing. Current tech-level drones are already extremely lethal to civilians. Given the state of modern AI, including the poor abilities for facial recognition in real-world situations, sending "autonomous" weapons to take out targets in civilian areas will only increase the number of civilian victims.

Not to mention, assassinations, in the first place.

Edit: I get the gist of your comment- that it's already possible to kill (civilians or not) in horrible ways. Yes, but why do we need yet another way to do that, then? The more ways there are to commit wanton murder and destruction, the worse, surely?

As the quote from the league of legends series goes:

"Once it exists, a weapon will never be unmade, and it will be used."

You're not wrong, but at least some SAR (search and rescue) efforts are already leading to better response times in bad weather and thus saved lives.

Example from REGA, a swiss SAR provider. https://www.rega.ch/en/our-missions/cutting-edge-technology/...

There is nothing wrong with using killing robots to defend your country. Once you are attacked and your family is in danger of rape and murder you will ask the gov to use any means available. Would you prefer them to use artisanal swords? Its the new dawn, the danger is real, there is no place for conspiracies ( that's probably when skynet will be created, oh well everyone wants to survive now not later in ideal future)

Unfortunately the same technology can be used to attack people. The world would maybe be a safer place if weapons technology hadn't evolved from sticks and stones.

Ask American Natives about that

Longer sticks, bigger stones, further arrows, thicker armour, pointier tips, faster horses, gatling bullets, heavier tanks, distant artillery and hypersonic missiles.

It would be a safer place for the physically strong, perhaps.

It would be a far more dangerous place for a slender 18-year-old girl.

I think most slender 18 year old girls rely on the protection offered by strong (or strongly armed) people regardless of far advanced weapons technology is.

Most people rely on others for their own safety. That’s not the point that I’m trying to make here. Rather, I’m saying that weapons technology is the only thing that has freed the individual from being subject to the whims of those physically stronger than themselves.

Jesus Christ rhetoric like that is how you got to /r/2020PoliceBrutality

Now all we need to do is tell the attackers they can't use the killing robots, problem solved.

The US (and Israel) is the leader in Hi-tech and mil spending, using cutting edge tech is clearly main advantage. It does not make sense to responde symmetrically with nukes and stuff

Here’s an idea: tell Putin he can’t use nuclear weapons, then invade him!!!

You could also read it as: "Our search and rescue drones can help you find a child who is lost in the woods".

Seems like it should be read both ways as both are inevitable with the tech.

Watching the current war, I think those drones are not that useful: slow, short-range, suspectible to bad weather and visibility, and carrying too small warhead.

So it's like using a laptop to hammer a nail. There are way more deadliest, simplest and reliable solutions, unfortunately.

I think this war shows how useful they are in urban combat, not a place where ballistic missile speeds and range are relevant. Small warhead would be a feature in close combat.

In modern wars, Russians solve the urban problem by converting urban landscape to rural (aka groznyfication). See Grozny, Aleppo, Mariupol.

And ballistic missiles are not for the task -- too funky and expensive, they are used to strike fuel/amunition storages. For urban warfare they use howitzers, mortars and 500/1000/2000kg air bombs.

Guns/muskets weren't that useful initially either. But the potential was there. Bows and arrows proved to be more effective for 100+ years before guns eventually won out.

> So it's like using a laptop to hammer a nail.

No. It's like using a nail gun rather than a hammer.

> There are way more deadliest, simplest and reliable solutions, unfortunately.

But none with the potential of drones and swarms. Cheap, easy to replace units that could fly, provide recoissance along with offensive/defensive capabilities. And it's just the beginning.

I suspect most armies, law enforcement, private mercenaries, mall cops, etc will be using drones in the future.

> Watching the current war, I think those drones are not that useful

I'm going to copy an analogy I saw elsewhere: what we're seeing now is the equivalent of how planes were used in WWI; slow, not very effective, with limited range and roles. By the time WWII came around, there was technological and strategic improvements leading to to high-alt bombers, fighter escorts, dive bombers and jet engines. Nothing a WWI pilot would recognize. Drones will likely evolve in ways that would make their current use seem quaint.

These are basically Manhacks from Half Life 2

I agree, but there is always a cynical angle to everything.

> We’ve all seen enough movies to know this is how it starts … but of course it could be useful in rescue or combat circumstances as well.

Uhhh the latter is exactly what we're worried about

Image caption from the article: “No escape for you, target human. Image Credits: Zhou et al”

The question we engineers should keep in mind is:

Traditionally it has been very hard to force the will of the few onto the many, without at least having some of those many taking part in the game. There are technologies with the potential to massively alter that equation.

If you develop such a technology like this one you can be sure it might be used precisely for this purpose: powerful men now need fewer poor men to stay in power.

Maybe it is me living in Germany, but the imagination how the Nazis would have put to use the technology we are currently developing makes me shiver. Many of us create technology as if our democracies are built forever. And they are — until they are not. Or they are not — but not where we live, so we don't care.

I get, that it is hard to find any technology that couldn't in some way be abused in a horrendous fashion by the next authotarian society — however there certainly is a gradient there. And we decide where we feel comfortable to put ourselves.

The trouble is, there are undemocratic societies where this is being built as well. This drone swarm is actually from China. The reasons why we build these systems is to prevent the undemocratic societies gaining power over us. The threat of our own societies becoming undemocratic doesn't feel as pressing as the threat of undemocratic societies that exist today.

The atomic bomb is a good example, a lot of the scientist working on it wouldn't have if there weren't fears that Nazi Germany was going to build it first.

This also reminds of the prisoners dilemma. If both parties choose not to build these systems we would be all fine, if one builds it and the others doesn't the other is screwed. If both build it they are both screwed but not as much.

These slaughterbots will completely shift military strategies, just like atomic bombs.

In the last 100 years (and probalbly even further back) it has been incredibly difficult to fight an opponent who was fortified in a (bombed) city. Ukraine is a great example of what a few organized soldiers with anti-tank weapons can hold off.

Swarms of jamming resistant drones would completely trivialize urban fighting for the attacker. I'm worried about the future if attacking becomes easier than defending.

Swarm of drones could probably be countered by an opposing swarm of drones that search and destroy enemy bots. But yes, this does raise the stakes, and those without tools to combat these weapons are absolutely screwed.

But you mentioned the anti-tank weapons. These didn't exist and before and a column of tanks would have an easy time with even a large and organized force of infantry soldiers. This is what happened in Poland during WW2.

So I'm hopeful that we will have a counter for these new systems like we now have counters to tanks.

Ukraine is an example of what you can hold off… if and only if your enemy refuses to use chemical weapons developed in 1910. Like Chechnya, like the Iraqi holdouts who went against Saddam, they are going to lose the moment international eyes turn away or their enemy no longer views international disappointment as a threat.

Do you fundamentally disagree with this writeup?

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

It’s a bit of a lot read, so I can’t respond substantially right now. However, the write up doesn’t seem to apply in this situation. The article states it applies to a select group of counties only. Quote:

> why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries…

I don’t think either of my examples were top tier militaries, which is presumably why they resorted to chemical weapons to both win and subjugate the civilian population.

Edit:

I read the article you posted now. I don’t think I and the article disagree. I think chemical weapons are of use against civilian holdouts / paramilitary. This is especially the examples I used. The goal of this last phase of the war is not to kill everyone, but to make them lose hope and surrender.

Fighting them upright is a bad deal. You can overwhelm civilians but every tank they destroy boosts morale to the point you have to just destroy the city and kill hundreds of thousands to get them to give in. Chemical weapons disrupt life, injure civilians, and give them no proper enemy to fight back against for morale boosts. That they are ineffective is a positive in this scenario as from your POV, this is just a “police action” against “rebels”. You don’t want more effective weapons, since you believe you already won, and doing more is just wasting the population and resources you came here to conquer anyways.

Yeah, what if we increase the capability of our weapon? Oh right, it will be expensive again.

> Many of us create technology as if our democracies are built forever. And they are — until they are not.

I agree 100%, this is why we need more people working on getting 3D printing and other fabrication techniques into the hands of as many people as we can. The right to bear arms holds no water in the US as the DoD so massively outweighs any possible resistance the populace could offer; the only way to safeguard our democracies is to bring the scales back to level.

democrazy and free will / human rights is already dead when they vaccine mandated us to carry on with our lives. or else.

Prior to the invention of reliable, accurate firearms, for much of history a relatively small number of dedicated warriors (e.g. armored knights on warhorses, samurai, cavalry, archers, etc) could dominate a much larger population of commoners (and conscript them into lesser forces such as infantry to increase their strength). To a degree, heavy weapons such as tanks, artillery, and armored helicopters allow dictators to exercise control over their people by employing a moderate sized army. Anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles appear to have cut into this advantage, but you still need pretty serious support from state actors to acquire those.

Different technological innovations in warfare have sometimes been leveling (eg guns as “the great equalizer”, anti-tank missiles) and sometimes had the opposite effect (e.g. attack helicopters and fighter jets). It does seem plausible that robotic weapons will favor those with vast resources, even when they lack manpower. It’s not impossible that it could go the other way, though. Actually, I can see drones going both ways.

Feudalism is fractal, and at least you know the face of your overlord.

We are building ever more precise weapons with less and less collateral damage and you are worried about evil people using the precise ones?

It sounds like you are making the argument that collateral damage will make people more likely to rebel against an authoritarian regimes. Is that actually true?

Isn’t the situation in Russia right now an example of a single individual dominating millions? And all back through history from the advent of armies, isn’t it the same thing?

It is, but you are flipping the direction of causality here.

I said: Certain technologies make it easier for the few to force the many. I did not say that certain technologies are the only way to do so.

Also: this is about numbers. The vast majority of Russians are in support of their president. Now imagine it would be less, lets say 30% or 10%. Or maybe 1%? At some point a threshold is crossed at which those in power cannot sustain themselves anymore.

And there are technologies that move that threshold down, because less people can control more people. Imagine e.g. how guns helped to sustain control of huge populations of colonized or enslaved people by relatively few oppressors. At this point in times guns pushed down the percentage of people needed to yield power over others.

At some point more people got guns and things leveled out a bit. Because ot was something multiple parties of a conflict could eventually use. But here comes the point: you still need people to wield those guns and willing to put their lives at risk. Sure you can trick them into doing that — but if you push your luck too much they can turn on you at any moment. For a swarm of killer drones you need less people and they don't need to risk anything.

I hear you, it's a valid point. Social media, facial recognition and perhaps other techs do fascilitate that, BUT weapons we haven't really seen that. I can't think of any examples -- with guns, one could argue that Texas for example would be harder to dominate than a meeker state. I guess perhaps your point is as much that this is tech that doesn't require humans, and I agree that's a step more dangerous, because the individual morality of the soldier is absent.

Maybe Ocarina of Time was oddly prescient and we'll soon have little quadcopters following us around saying "Hey! Listen!" to alert us to fairly-obvious details.

Life imitates art.

Art imitates nature. All ideas are remixes of previous ideas, and ideas are ultimately rooted in observations from nature. A human mind in a vacuum wouldn’t be able to create anything.

I can see it haha

You can go back to Vernor Vinge's "Realtime" series.

Nearing the singularity, most people have their own personal defence drone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge#Realtime/Bobble_s...

Vernor Vinge's work is amazing. In the story "A fire upon the deep" he introduces the most amazing concepts, and there's a realistic way that an AI reboots itself after being in cold storage, there's a Usenet communication between civilizations, and the most impressive was an idea that there's regions in the universe where the speed of light is faster and brains work at a higher rate. It's an amazing work. Later he comes up with the prescient "focus factor" in the sequel.

There's also this entertaining Brazilian series on Netflix - Omniscient (Onisciente) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11542920/

Another N64 title, Jet Force Gemini, had exactly that [1]!

[1] https://youtu.be/m-_0gOM2iRg?t=245

Can't wait to get drone-slapped!

I can understand the concerns of the technology might be abused in DoD but I should point out that it is much better to see this result on Science Robotics, TRO, ICRA, and IROS etc. Military is behind many technology innovations but this doesn't mean all technologies should be used for military purpose only.

The work done is by:

http://zju-fast.com/

Disclaimer: Roboticist, have worked with fast-lab on World Robotics Sailing Championship

> I can understand the concerns of the technology might be abused in DoD

Technology getting abused by the DoD is "fine". Technology that has very few applications outside the DoD is less fine.

Agree, aerial vehicles are slightly better than maritime vehicles in this sense. I left maritime robotics because I couldn’t find any decent paying job that is not defense related :( What we can do as a student team is to open-source it.

If you play opening sequence of Terminator you will notice that the weapons used are exactly what makes sense to deploy against Russia - Ai orchestrated drones, hi power laser (Raphael Tech) turrets mounted on autonomous vehicles. We just need to connect everything to supercomputer to come up with attack strategies in real time based on vast amounts of sensor data

> are exactly what makes sense to deploy against Russia

Not sure why you think a bunch of ground drones are useful against ICBMs.

If the drones have lasers that are powerful and accurate enough[1], they can be very useful against ICBMs on a ballistic trajectory.

1. The navy is already testing ground-based lasers powerful enough to destroy drones and light aircraft.

I’m not sure if this is satire, but everything you’ve written is a terrible idea.

Expanding from Baktyar drones to autonomous ground weapons and lasers sounds ‘connected to a supercomputer’ sounds like a way to escalate the situation both within Ukraine, and to the rest of the connected community.

People in the drone industry have a very weak definition of density!

Sure, this could be useful if your forest is made of 3ft-spaced branchless bamboos, with no bushes or anything else to hit.

I dont think they get out much. Nor do they seem to know what a leaf is.

What, the Nissan car?

I wonder about the psychology of the people (researchers) working on "innovations" such as these (other things also come to mind, e.g. face detection in crowds, optimizing fragment distribution from bomb/granade explosions).

Are they just extremely myopic, and cannot see the consequences of their work at all? Or naive, in that they only can imagine the positive use cases?

...or (to simplify) are they evil and fully understand and welcome the terrifying outcomes?

I fully understand the terrifying outcomes but would have no problem building these systems to act as deterrent, or counter-force, to the people who would use these "innovations" for evil purposes.

So there is a third option, alongside your original two.

Name a country that develops high tech weaponry and doesn't do one of the two:

- Use it for evil purposes

- Sell it to other nations that then use it for evil purposes

Anyone involved in the defence industry is complicit in the death of innocents, your third option is a fallacy.

But you presumably rely on your own nation’s military to help protect and safeguard your rights, freedoms, even your life. Without drone and anti-tank / aircraft missiles, Ukraine would already be lost, and Putin would be on to his next conquest. If we agree to allow our own soldiers to risk their lives to defend us, then we are morally obligated to provide them with the best protection we can provide for them. That’s a choice: we could choose to not support our soldiers, but then we should forego the right to be protected by them.

Sure. I do not argue that we should abolish the military and all defence industry. I _do_ argue that the military industrial complex is by and large profit driven and motivated by greed not the desire to protect its citizens. I do believe that anyone working for, for example, BAE systems is on average making the world a (much) worse place. I don't believe the individuals involved are necessarily morally bankrupt themselves.

You agree that there should be a military and a defense industry, but anyone working on weapons R&D is a malevolent actor (ie “making the world a much worse place)? This seems illogical.

The effectiveness of a military is tightly bound to its long term R&D armaments. Without highly effective arms, and proper training and tactics, casualties suffered by our armed forces in combat would be far higher (as the Russians are discovering).

If you accept that the military exists at least in part to protect you, then investment in arms development follows as an obligation to those sent into harms way on your behalf.

I agree there should be a military and a defense industry which is _different_ from our current system. I believe anyone working for the _current_ system is likely to be causing harm greater than the good they also cause.

Malevolent implies intent. I'm sure that there are non evil people who are working for BAE. I'm also sure that the vast majority of them have facilitated far more innocent death than worthy defense of life.

> casualties suffered by our armed forces in combat would be far higher

I have not supported any of the military action my nation has taken in my lifetime and any casualties are primarily a result of the greed (for power, votes, or wealth) of those in power. The lack of equipment has acutely caused casualties, but the existence of the military industrial complex has caused the wars in which they take place.

I'm not saying I have the great solution to end all war and create world peace. But I can't see a reason other than naivety, apathy, or propaganda that someone could work for BAE and think they are doing good in the world.

Your position seems logically and morally indefensible. You accept that you individually and your society as a whole need both a (presumably effective) military and a defense industry. The latter must necessarily engage in significant defense research in order for the former to perform its role.

You say that you want the system to better than the current system. Well, who doesn’t want that? Germany would like to stop buying Russian gas, when it works for them. You draw benefit today from the imperfect system we have today. You could choose to abandon any claim to protection from the existing armed forces of your nation, or you can admit that you are a direct beneficiary of that system, and that it exists to protect you and others like you.

The people protecting you from a Russian invasion don’t deserve Javelin missiles to stop the advance of Russian tanks, or explosive reactive armor to keep them from being blown to bits by enemy shaped charges? Troops being sent now to garrison Poland and other NATO countries against a Russian assault are there on behalf of citizens of all NATO countries.

I don't deny that, each country has done or has the capacity to commit atrocities. Some just do it less.

The third option isn't a fallacy if you are looking it from the perspective of that individual researcher who lives in a country that seeks to develop those weapons because its rivals are also developing them. They are thinking for their own safety and the safety for the people around them who live in that country. Would you do nothing if you know your efforts could potentially shield the people you love from harm? Or would you help build the system knowing that they might get misused, in the hopes that it at least protects you and the people dear to you?

EDIT: typos.

I do indeed make the choice to not work in the defence industry as opposed to helping building such systems. So in effect, yes I do nothing. I can't argue that the military does not to some level protect me - I do believe that in my (western EU) country the military and the arms trade is almost exclusively, right now, dedicated towards either atrocities, proxy wars, or selling to Saudi Arabia et al. Call me naive and argue that without these things my loved ones and I would be at risk, but I could never personally support the current system we have, and I question the degree to which those who believe they are doing good, on average, are in fact doing so.

Or they hate the slaughterbots video and want to prove it wrong by building high tech drones that fall short of the science fiction depicted in the video. I think I would join that group.

They don't believe that "innovations" you mentioned are something 'dirty' or 'unpleasant'. I think it's like contention between vegan vs non-vegan at the end of the day.

Or they are trying to get paid and mostly willfully ignore the larger implications of their work.

OTOH if the work is possible it will be done, so you might as well develop it for agencies you align with if you have the expertise.

Closest thing the DoD has for swarming drones right now. Mostly focused on indoor exploration currently.

https://shield.ai/products/nova-class

Are all weapons by necessity a bad thing?

One weapon that comes to mind is the anti-tank missile. Without these weapons, tanks would be essentially invulnerable to light infantry.

That has implications for anybody fighting a war of resistance against a better armed aggressor. One example would be the Ukrainians, but in general, light infantry are typical of resistance movements, because they are cheaper to equip. The anti-tank missile dramatically reduces the ability of strong, aggressive states to dominate their neighbors, and citizens.

So far, drones have played a similar role. By massively lowering the financial and technical difficulties of providing close air support, they disproportionately benefit those combatants that don't have the money or resources to have a traditional air force.

I would like to take the time to discuss how humanity can make a drone swarm that can fly through a dense bamboo-forest with 30 cm spacing of the trees but fail to make a video player that have any type of time controls in 2022...

Will and initiatives

Super cool! Hope we can use this technology to look for missing people.

Wow, a positive use for this technology! Nice! I couldn't think of any use for it other than hunting the last few humans living off of nuts & berries to extinction as part of the machine uprising.

The quadcopters are not terribly efficient, they spending too much energy hovering.

I think a fixed-wing drone of the similar form factor is the way to go, would fly many times longer. However, they will fly much faster and can’t stop. To be able to reliably evade obstacles and other drones, they gonna need much better sensors, also more on-board GFlops of compute power to handle data from these sensors.

Fortunately, we still have amazing rate of technical progress so far in both cameras and mobile SoCs, driven by smartphones. For this reason, I think really amazing ones might arrive 5-10 years in the future.

I can't help but look at this thing with nothing but cynicism. While `surfsvammel` has given one scenario where it could be useful in a positive way, I think the negative aspects of this far outweighs the positives.

What could possibly go wrong?

Annoying techcrunch links, they go directly to guce.advertising.com to turn around, but the turn doesn't work with things like uMatrix so you just get stuck.. :/

https://archive.ph/FybGv

So when do I get to purchase my own swarm of defense drones? Cuz we will probably need them in a few years at this rate of improvement

Somehow I was expecting the swarm to fly much faster... Still impressive though.

I wonder if chaff or some sort of ferrous dustcloud could disable swarms?

It appears they are just using cameras. Nevertheless rolls of tinfoil will come in handy for the zombie robot apocalypse so make sure you have some handy.

> It appears they are just using cameras

Deploy the Tactical Trompe-l'œil

Wile E Coyote was a master of this.

Slaughterbots are coming closer…

I want video

Actual paper has video. http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abm5954

2 years from now the sequel: https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM

and you can't skip through the video, there are literally zero controls besides pause/play, so don't bother wasting your time, I think I haven't seen such bad player in years

I scrolled through the page multiple times, came back here to double check that it actually contains a video and only after that I found it

To re-enable the native browser controls, run this in your browser's dev tools console:

Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName("video")).forEach(x => x.setAttribute("controls", ""))

Oh, and it's DRM-protected, too! We truly live in the future.

If anyone happens to know the Brightcove video API

Account: 53038991001

Video 1 ID: 6305520207112

Video 2 ID: 6305519415112

API: https://apis.support.brightcove.com/playback/getting-started...

For request video by ID: https://edge.api.brightcove.com/playback/v1/accounts/{accoun...

Let's try:

https://edge.api.brightcove.com/playback/v1/accounts/5303899...

No joy for me, seems to want a request-policy-key, but if someone else wants to take a stab...

As well as unsolicited sound.

(circa:2020) Meet the U.S. Army’s New Drone Swarms : https://mindmatters.ai/2020/09/meet-the-u-s-armys-new-drone-...

The video is private.

search: >video:"Drone Swarm"< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=video:"Drone Swarm">

Mods, please move post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31269963 >tjr225 -> 'The video is private.'<

to under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31269340 >peppertree -> 'Actual paper has video'<

To restore the context tree. thanks

SiFi TV series 'Black Mirror' episode: 'Hated in the Nation' (2016) - IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5709236/

<https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=black-mirror:'Bee drone ...>

they are coming to deliver much needed vaxxines to the unvaxxed.

So very glad I'll be dead in 50 years.

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