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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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