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Comment by rawgabbit | Hacker News Reader

Ukraine is deploying AI enabled drones that require no fiber optic wires and no electronic tethering. They patrol autonomously and identify targets; a human authorizes the strike and they take out targets by themselves. This is the holy grail of modern warfare; destroy the enemy’s rear staging and logistics. If they don’t have fuel or ammo, they are a defenseless sitting target.

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These kinds of systems are rare or super rare.

Not for long. Software copies easily. Hardware's more difficult.

You need hardware for these things. High speed image processing and high precision control and global shutter cameras. You can't just slap a raspi on it with any run of the mill camera and call it a day.

So what? A Google Pixel 9 Pro costs only about 4 times what a bare RPi 5 with a run of the mill camera costs, yet with its NPU it can perform 45 trillion operations per second with a camera that can reach 240 frames per second at a resolution of 2 megapixels. Do you think that's insufficient to autonomously pilot a drone moving at highway speeds towards a target that it identified as a fighter jet? In addition, it has an onboard battery, GPS, cellular and WiFi connectivity, pressure sensor, accelerometer, and USB connectivity. A phone by itself could replace practically all of the brains of a single use drone and they sell phones literally in the millions. The hardware is terrifyingly easy to source.

It's not as easy as plopping a new SW on it. Have you wondered why, despite this conflict dragging on for this long, autonomous targeting is still not common? It's just much harder to do, and doing it reliably is actually super hard.

Hw access is also not as easy as you think. Try getting a Pixel 9 class SoC board that you can actually dev stuff on, you'd be surprised how hard it is to get such a thing. And when you get it, it will probably be 2x as expensive for just the board.

Oh, put the Pixel 9 on it then. Have you tried doing optical flow on rolling shutter cameras?

Then, whatever solution you get, you need sufficient volume and reliable supply of the thing. Oh, you can't find the chip anymore? Good luck porting the stack you have since the pipeline is different.

Whereas these rc FPV drones you can basically build what what you find in the back of your drawer.

With advances in drones but issues with communications I thought it was obvious that having a drone-area-of-denial would be a thing.

I mean, if minefields are okay with the intention to kill anything that walks in the area, why not drones?

got any more links for info on these?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbC2cD1Mxjc https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260601-ukraine-kamikaze...

huh? how does one keep a human in the loop for decision making it there is not an 'electronic tether'?

A human is not piloting the drone. It patrols even if it lost communication due to jamming. It does need communication to ask the human for authorization to strike.

> It does need communication to ask the human for authorization to strike.

well.. about that. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou...

this article says "one time test" but i, personally, can't believe it's not being used daily.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...

You need human confirmation (for now) only when your side might be there. Tell your army not to go someplace and you can kill anything that is there.

I wonder about the feasibility of an IFF-like mechanism at the level of individual soldiers. The drone could be designed not to attack when a nearby transmitter is broadcasting a prearranged encrypted code that's dependent on elapsed mission time or some other hard-to-spoof factor. Any humans caught out in the open without the IFF signal present are fair game.

I think you can do this relatively simply with infrared led lights. Imagine "Please don't kill me" remote controls. You are a bit more visible when broadcasting, but presumably you can be selective when turning it on.

You need some thing that the enemy cannot spoof. That means two way communication and a shared secret (public private key may count).

Then we need to ask what happens if communication itself fails? An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications. Either you do nothing in that case because there might be something you can't communicate with, or you kill your own people

I think one way communication should be sufficient together with a shared secret. It's probably less reliable compared to two way communication, but it should satisfy the criteria. IR visual pattern propagation will respect this. You don't have radio spectrum that is too prone to jamming, and if the drones are visual navigation/targeting based, if they can see you to acquire the you as a target, they can identify you as a friend as long as you can ensure emitters are not occluded from your side.

It's not perfect, but it's cheap and it should work.

Give me a couple hundred k and I can probably build the prototype, haha.

An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications.

The idea being that there is no communication to jam because the drone is fully autonomous. Given that, one needs a foolproof way for it to identify the enemy.

In this case the absence of communication would be what gives it permission to engage. Jamming the drone would not save you, but you could potentially make it attack its own forces if there happened to be any around at the time it comes for you. An IR beacon would make that very hard to accomplish.

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