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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

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.

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