Autonomous drones are supposedly already used for oil refineries (vision based navigation, to mitigate GPS jamming), once this tech trickles down to smaller drones things will get really scary..
You'd think so. I mean to fly a quad properly, you'd need like 20-30 hours. To just crash a drone into a large enough target, 6-7 hours is more than enough.
As for having to be relatively close to the drone, range extenders these days seem to go a long way.. or even having a receiver outside a safe bunker - that seems to be how the Ukrainians/Russians fly these days.
I know nothing about this but this makes it sound like the target is cooperative. Isn't it harder to crash into a target that actively tries to avoid you?
(E.g. listening for propeller whine, shooting at objects in sky, ducking into small openings, having signal jammers, moving/arranging personnel to limit the impact of drone damage, running counter-drone efforts, etc.)
I remember reading that book about the Predator drone and being surprised how much of Predator effectiveness came down to pilot skill, rather than technology. The predator was just a slow, small prop plane, after all. What made it powerful was that the pilots knew exactly how to use those properties (along with knowledge of the enemies' technology limitations) to evade detection and interception.
> to evade detection and interception.
I was under the impression that the Reaper was typically used where US has air superiority. There is an international combat guy on Youtube who fought with the YPG in Rojava and has been hunted by that type of loitering drone, he said they are easy enough to hide from, but the main thing is that they are almost always around-- and eventually lead to complacency. To quote the IRA: "we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."
You don't have to worry about stalling, latency, accuracy etc.. they are also harder to shoot down because of their size and speed.
So they simply select targets like a moving vehicle or a bunker or even a group of moving people, and go kamikaze.
That is here now. Small drones are appearing in Ukraine that target vehicles and infantry using machine vision and thermal imaging. This is driven by RF jamming that limits FPV. Also, the terminal phase of a small drone attack is often where the attack fails and automating that improves effectiveness even when FPV is possible. Less skill is necessary when a fighter can just designate a target and hit the 'kill' button, so this is a force multiplier.
An interesting story on this is found here[1]. Quantity serial production is underway and it will be in wide use very soon, as in the next couple weeks. One thing they've done is secure the software to prevent reverse engineering.
[1] https://mil.in.ua/en/news/drones-with-machine-vision-are-bei...
Another thing that stands out to me in that article is the claim that production is limited by component availability. An obvious thing to do is further enhancing these drones by converting them from suicide drones to bomb delivery vehicles so they can be reused.
> Bombs and artillery is the main weapon
That's a generalization that overlooks a great deal in Ukraine. It's like selecting some organ in the body and calling it the "main organ." These drones frequently provide precision forward observation that enables artillery and precision missiles. It's a system, and without FPV observation, FPV interdiction and other contributions Ukraine wouldn't be performing as well as it has.
As for optional, full autonomy on small drones - I suspect it's further along than many might expect.
We're almost there: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369380266_Channel-A...
I can't find the link, but I believe I read Russian doctors claiming that drones were now the #1 cause of battlefield infantry injuries.
Someone is gonna end up using something like a global hawk (spy drone) to deploy smaller kamikaze drones.
Headed to production