"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot."
"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...
Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings? Russians would shoot them down faster than any drone could get them.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Good old non-AI radar-guided missile launched by human crew of Russians.
The startup attempting this would need Actual Indians for the first few special ops attempts before getting the true AI experience.
A static target only needs to be seen once.
…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?
Camera drone hovers above target and kamakazi drone intersects the line between camera and target, and drops.
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.
We've had two years of footage of drones being flown over tanks, and bombs dropped directly down into them.
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.
Your first response was disrespectful. Probably because you are young and immature. Grow up.
How? Without GPS, it's navigation capabilities lower than V-2 rocket.
I've had that happen to the company I work at and we literally have zero AI stuff.
AI gets so much boost from this nonsense. Because now it's about saving our lives.
"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.
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.
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.
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.