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Comment by Ciantic | Hacker News Reader

The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4]

[1]: https://ardupilot.org/

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk...

[3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot

[4]: https://www.404media.co/ukraines-massive-drone-attack-was-po...

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To be clear, that's because Ardupilot is a really pretty routine UAV navigation project with obvious civilian/industrial/enthusiast application. People hack on Ardupilot because it's fun to see your drone fly around on its own. That you can also put a grenade on it is sort of an obvious extension, but the payload is very much a separate feature.

So what did they do, just stick GPS coordinates and the drones were that successful autonomously (talking of the Russian fighter base attack from the last 48 hours)? I'd be shocked if they didn't manually pilot these things.

OpenCV and other onboard computer softwares can be trained to recognize shapes, 10+ years ago there was a demo of a NodeCopter controlled small drone following red flags.

Stick the GPS coord, fly there, and once in a geofence look for a shape to crash into doesn't seem impossible given what was possible 10 years ago.

There is often quite heavy GPS jamming or spoofing. Also in some of the published videos I think you can see a "no GPS lock" status message - but maybe they just did not bother with GPS if all the drones were manually piloted anyway.

Yes, I assumed they didn't need GPS because they knew exactly where the trucks that were the launch sites were to be placed and they knew approximately their targets would be sitting on a certain section of airport tarmac. The pilots would have had a detailed satellite photo map of their entire route until visual target ID was possible. While GPS was probably partially jammed, that deep in Russia I doubt it would have been as severe as near the front lines. Plus there wouldn't have been heavy jamming of the local drone control frequencies because they weren't expecting a drone attack there.

To me the more interesting question is how they managed sending the real-time video feeds and control data. Since the trucks were mobile, I assume it had to be via a bunch of mobile phones signed up to Russian service providers since Starlink doesn't work inside Russia. To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth wired link, maybe a front company established for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections.

I assume drone guidance builds on missile guidance. Old cruise missiles were loaded with mission-specific terrain maps to follow to their targets

Given these are static targets, it might be possible to relay precise GPS information from that morning’s satellite data. No real time intelligence required. Just dead reckoning to the target coordinates.

Dead reckoning in a drone would be a nearly impossible feat considering how variable wind can be.

The wrong term, but I know there has been extensive research in maintaining accuracy without GPS.

If you have a downward facing camera you can track your movement like an optical mouse by just watching the terrain. Error will creep in, but you only need to fly a few kilometers till you find something that looks like a strategic bomber.

I'm dumb. I don't know why I didn't think about the cameras being used to maintain location.

Dead reckoning with error correction using known landmarks like highways, maybe

Operation in GNSS-denied areas is already a stock feature on many relatively inexpensive commercial drones. The manufacturers talk about it euphemistically for obvious reasons, but they're designing drones specifically for the Ukraine war. There's a huge amount of engineering effort going into building drones that can remain operational in an extremely hostile RF environment.

Compensating for wind drift is a fairly straightforward software problem when you've got a fast processor, a bunch of high-resolution cameras and a laser rangefinder.

https://www.autelrobotics.com/productdetail/evo-lite-enterpr...

GPS is heavily jammed throughout Russia, and the ArduPilot overlays shown on the videos released directly show there was no GPS lock (might not have been equipped as I'm sure they'd be expecting this).

Hell, 30 years ago I was working for the MOD (they sponsored my PhD and turned it into an RA) in the UK creating context-aware neural network inference engines for FLIR (Forward-looking infra-red) data. We had all sorts of "fun" stuff running on a Meiko computing surface, with parallelised network training and implementations, temporal and spatial averaging, and relaxation labelling all thrown into the mix to aid the recognition engine, done with a voting system of various architectures sharing to a "blackboard" where information could be posted to and read from. Visualisation was all on high-end (for the time) Silicon Graphics workstations.

The context (together with the features extracted) was the killer (forgive the pun) feature though - everything else reduced noise, but context increased signal.

My gast remains flabbered that the sort of thing I was working on back then hasn't become commonplace in the interim. The computing power available today, compared to then, and the accuracy we had (I know for a fact at least one of the designs was made into real hardware, it was called RH7, and "RH" stood for "Red Herring" - oh how we laughed) ... It beggars belief that it was just left to digitally rot.

You are correct:

> ...each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo

They need to make a movie behind this one, that just looks like such a cyberpunk operation.

There are so many possible scripts that could be based on what has happened since 2022 in Ukraine. There would be no need for exaggeration of the heroism, bravery, and loss. The only issue might be that people would not believe it actually happened.

From Zelenskyy, a previous comedic actor refusing to flee, "I need ammunition, not a ride," to the defense of Snake Island "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," to all the brave women who volunteered, the farmers towing abandoned Russian tanks, the constant drone attacks on residential and commercial areas, the 40,000 stolen Ukrainian children, this most recent attack on Russian air bases...

If this was a movie, I would probably think it was a bit much myself, but this all happened. We witnessed it.

"Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!"

An actor who's last role was the lead in a sitcom about an ordinary citizen who becomes the unlikely president of Ukraine.

... is not particularly more surprising than the US president who starred in "Bedtime for Bonzo"

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bedtime_for_bonzo

I remember NodeCopter and running OpenCV to control them years ago.

https://gist.github.com/andrew/2f81952f4867d1b200bb

The big difference is they can now run this on the copter instead of being remotely controlled; a 100$ raspberry pi has enough processing power for this, and so does several other off-the-shelf mini computers powered by lithium batteries.

Crazy times.

Apparently, there were hundred+ drone pilots available who were spread across several timezones should the AI not be able to find their way visually. If you see some of the streaming video snippets, it says GPS fix unavailable likely due to jamming of GNSS systems and disabling of civilian GLONASS near bases. As such, Russian domestic cell carriers were reportedly used to stream video and for manual terminal guidance following visual cues, hence the daylight timing of the raid.

Source on the 100+ drone pilots an cell carriers? I've been hoping to find an article on how they staged the pilots for manual guidance. I imagined they would have had to tunnelled all that traffic to each operator from the truck, but the cell towers is clever

One report said the drone attack was sequential, not swarming. So perhaps only one remote operator per truck, with about 2-3 minutes between each drone launch, depending on how far the previous one had to go to reach its target.

Interesting. I guess they could have 2-3x less operators than 1:1. If the Russians shutdown the cell phone networks nationwide, that might've stopped most of it except for drones that had INS and/or ability to visually follow "terrain map" under AI guidance.

"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo

The drones reportedly flew from their containers to the staging area autonomously, where they were taken over by the pilots for the attack approach.

Source?

https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1929269307189469624

You can also see the careful departure of drones from containers in the videos, without extra panning or yaw. Not quite how a human operator would fly them.

The question was more about the human taking over near the end, no?

Thread without log-in

https://xcancel.com/lemonodor/status/1929269307189469624

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJcjt_W8iCo

Also this: https://www.404media.co/ukraines-massive-drone-attack-was-po...

"ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost."

So it is not fully autonomous.

Not for this task, but could be used autonomously. If they trusted that these planes were still in the same spot, and their GPS coordinates were accurate to 10 cm, then what they could do is just program the drones to fly a preset route at preset heights, stop over the plane's wing and then descend all the way to 0 meters.

Even with that level of target knowledge (I suspect the US has the investment in the sensor-targeting links to be able to use satellites to know within cm where planes were within a five minute window, but am not sure about other nations) you'd want to have some that were available for later re-targeting to handle misses. Nuclear weapons war plans solve this by relentlessly re-targeting again and again (declassified 1960's USAF war plans called for over 70 different missiles to hit Moscow alone) but with the smaller damage radius of conventional weapons you either end up with a second strike to make sure you get all the survivors of the first strike- or have a trained human who knows the targeting priority in the loop available to update targeting on the fly.

GPS can't be relied on in that heavily denied area. And indeed the screenshots show drones in failsafe mode.

So what about the AI part that has been mentioned by several outlets?

I would assume someone speculated and then the hype brain took over and everyone reported it as AI.

I've had that happen to the company I work at and we literally have zero AI stuff.

Hype Brain :) And the language changed just a little bit..

From my understanding that was to be used as a last resort.

there was this German talking head "Nico Lange" who made this claim first without providing evidence for it. He is an ex politician and a regular in the Munich Security Conference and I assume this is who was (mainly) responsible for spreading it.

AI gets so much boost from this nonsense. Because now it's about saving our lives.

Sun Tzu says it better:

"A military operation involves deception."

He could be telling the truth, he could be lying... A drone programmed to automatically boot up , check its location, and if it's at the right coordinates, take off and crash at some other coordinates (the airfield) is more satisfying to "fans" of automated warfare.

For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...

The reports also mention the truck roof opening remotely, one could also use GPS coordinates to trigger this. But doing it manually from a distance, after checking the surveillance cameras that the coast is clear, is more reliable.

I guess they used smartphones and SIM cards with mobile data for the remote communication...

Only need one camera drone capable of identifying targets. And just tells another drone to bomb it.

..in theory. In practice, building such a complex system in a fail safe way is not that easy.

Still only need one camera drone if a human is spotting targets.

In theory. In practice you would not allow a single camera drone to be the single point of failure of a mission with such lengthy and risky planning, and dire consequences.

They had a limited amount of drones in those containers they needed to make them count. My money is on operators.

Still only need one flying drone to identify all targets. There maybe more camera drones available to pilot, but still only need one flying to spot.

A static target only needs to be seen once.

I understand that you’re probably just gonna reply with “still only need one camera”

…but if GPS is jammed, and there’s only one camera per fleet, how exactly are the other drones supposed to navigate towards the spotted targets unless they’re all equipped with cameras?

One camera drone can see if another drone is on target.

So the old “use a single unreliable 2D instrument to coordinate multiple fast-moving projectiles in three dimensional space” approach.

You are just continuing to spout nonsense.

Camera drone hovers above target and kamakazi drone intersects the line between camera and target, and drops.

So now the camera is pointed at the target? How is it checking that the other drones are headed in the right direction? And the personnel on the ground? They're just chillin' waiting for those other drones to come intersect with the stationary spotter drone's line of sight?

You are raging, and your thinking has ceased.

We've had two years of footage of drones being flown over tanks, and bombs dropped directly down into them.

No one is arguing the merits of drone warfare.

We have two years of footage from Ukraine, where camera-equipped drones are launched from a several miles away at most, and where there are networks of pilots and support specialists to assemble and launch more drones in case of (frequent) failure.

I don’t think it’s wise to wager the success of a 6-month mission deep in enemy territory on a plan with a single point of failure, especially when the alternative is equipping each drone with < $100 cameras.

But sure, you’re clearly the better thinker.

`I understand that you’re probably just gonna reply with “still only need one camera”`

Your first response was disrespectful. Probably because you are young and immature. Grow up.

Fair. Sorry about that.

You are just continuing to spout nonsense. All of the drones have cameras. Using a single designated camera drone is a stupid idea, overly complex and completely unnecessary.

I think the problem is an assumption that people are too stupid to grasp their brilliant idea.

That being said, having all drones equipped with cameras could enable a more robust version of what they’re talking about:

If uplink with human operators is lost, but short-range comms between drones exist, they could use their video feeds to autonomously coordinate amongst themselves.

lmao what? You want to loiter with a camera drone to guide other drones to target? How would that work if neither drone knows where it is (drones had no GPS lock, it's a fact, not a speculation)?

They knew where they started from. Know where the target is relative to the start point.

You need to read a bit more on autonomous systems and navigation, it will surely tame your hubris. Everything is simple if you don't understand it.

You have never written autonomous navigation systems.

I have in fact. For space applications. An now I will stop replying to what is seemingly a stubborn, clueless 16 year old.

> Know where the target is relative to the start point.

How? Without GPS, it's navigation capabilities lower than V-2 rocket.

"in a fail safe way" goes out the window in wartime.

I meant safe for the mission, not for any innocent souls around..

Cameras are incredibly cheap though. There's basically no reason not to put them on everything.

Or can “paint it” with an infrared laser point and then the drone can use simple sensors to guide itself to the target.

“Don’t attack this plane that already has a hole in it”

The startup attempting this would need Actual Indians for the first few special ops attempts before getting the true AI experience.

It's a military airfield, so no civilian 737 there. There seems to be a video from the drone, meaning some kind of connectivity was present with or without autopilot.

Reportedly it was just running over local mobile internet connectivity. The attack was over so quickly they would likely not even have time to shut it down.

It's strange - blocking GPS is typical around military sites. So, assume the drones were hard-coded to zero a location - they couldn't do it, as GPS would be blocked. They had to be piloted. Interesting.

Inertial navigation is a thing though. Your smart phone has a very capable accelerometer for a short flight.

Error propagation makes inertial navigation only useful over short distances.

In addition to the other reply, it might have been done with CV. Identify landmarks to get bearings, drop bomb on thing that looks like airplane.

Saw something saying they trained them on old Soviet planes at a military museum

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/53784

They did more than crash at coordinates, they targeted specific parts of the different aircraft.

> For extra fun, add some other code to "look for plane-like objects to crash into", but now you're approaching dangerous territory of "What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield"...

Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings? Russians would shoot them down faster than any drone could get them.

>Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings?

I'm not sure if the Tu-95 is hosted at any joint-use airports, but joint-use themselves airports are not uncommon. Pskov is joint-use, Ukraine launched a smaller-scale attack on some Il-76s there a couple years back. The scenario that an attack on legitimate target aircraft could be happening metres away from civilian aircraft is realistic.

It's not a problem when Russia, Israel, USA, or other nations attacks civilians, because of a military reason. Why it will be a problem in this case?

Because the makeup men don’t like Ukraine

Because whether or not they're justified in doing so, Ukraine has made it clear that they have no interest in targeting civilians. They've been incredibly surgical and precise in their attacks. Unbelievably so, honestly.

Whichever way this war ends you can be sure there will be lone Ukrainian terror attacks on Russia for next 50 years. People will not forgive.

There has never been a way where civilians are not attacked.

> What if a civilian 737 happens to be boarding at this airfield

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17

Good old non-AI radar-guided missile launched by human crew of Russians.

How could they be navigated from such a long distance? Satellite communication? Wouldn't the lag be too high?

Everyone was right next to the bases in Russia

Via the regular mobile network according to one article I read. The Ukrainians said that all operators where safely out of Russia when the news broke, so I doubt they where at the airfields several hundreds of kilometers from Ukraine.

To reduce latency, I wonder if the phones were connecting to a covert site in Russia which had a high-bandwidth, lower-latency wired link, maybe a front company established in Russia for the operation with servers and broadband internet connections. Or maybe just a colocated server at a major backbone site in Russia was rented by a Russian front company. Seems like the kind of thing intelligence services do. While I'm sure Russia has more restrictions on renting colocated servers than the U.S., it's still something that needs to happen every day. Russia also has a fairly robust underground economy of less-than-legitimate companies doing illicit things, so there have to be ways for those companies to avoid restrictions (probably involving bribing certain people).

If the attack was coordinated this way, I assume whoever sold the colo to Ukrainian intelligence thought they were simply setting up yet another server for a shady Russian scam company. Foreign intelligence services often avoid scrutiny by using the same methods as domestic criminals in the target country.

Okay, and GPS is restricted near military installations, but mobile internet remains accessible?

Yes, I assume it probably does except maybe during periods of elevated alert. A large military airbase capable of being home base to bombers is like a small city, with thousands of civilian workers.

Anyway, the drones used mobile internet between the launch point outside the base and the pilots in Ukraine. The connection between the launch point and the drones was point-to-point drone control frequencies which does not use the mobile phone network.

Yes, Ukrainian military leadership has admitted that Starlink has been so vital that they would have had no chance without it. Starlink latency can be faster than cable in some parts of the us. Remember light travels faster in air than through metal wire as radio.

When you watch some of the footage I feel like it’s clear that there were at least some human controlled drones there.

Andrew Tridgell, from rsync/samba to drone ....

What goes on in a person's mind when they pivot to making killing machines?

I would rather the enemy die than myself and my family.

That's a false dichotomy.

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