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Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

How’s a Lidar is a national risk?! (It’s easy to build a lidar based drones in a weekend project) Also, knowing plenty of US based drone manufacturers, most of their stuff are dependent on Chinese parts, the radio communication is on top of that list. If I were DJI, I would make Lidar and similar components modular, so they can still sell these drones while consumers can buy these modules later or DIY it, like literally most of the drones, which will be great for other consumers in the world for the easy repairability.

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I don't think it's LiDAR itself that is the risk. The FCC note read more like the cause is trade and supply-chain protectionism. (https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/robots-nsd.pdf)

> How’s a Lidar is a national risk?!

The anti-flock community believes it's because they can destroy image sensors from a distance. And banning the foreign ones means they can order domestic-made drones to have firmware that prevents them from operating in certain ways or in certain (government) areas, among other things.

The finance community thinks they just don't want competition that might rival or sell better than domestic ones, similar to the ban on Chinese EVs.

The privacy community thinks they only want surveillance to be possible from within, likening it to previous bans on DJI drones and Chinese routers. And the administration is currently working on trying to ban other kinds of networking gear as well as cellular modems from China (which is basically every phone in the country).

Would love to hear other theories. Perspectives are fun.

> And banning the foreign ones means they can order domestic-made drones to have firmware that prevents them from operating in certain (government) areas, among other things.

Yeah because DJI drones are well known for their easy to hack firmware and lacking support for no fly zones..right? And they would openly flaunt any US law making any drones sold or flown the US to obey the NFZs? But wait, that's exactly what DJI drones used to do even without a law on the books, before FCC banned them.

NFZ was just one example, there's no limit to what they could force other countries' software to do in their domestic versions. That was really the point I was trying to make.

Backdoors and tracking.

I am sure if the US gov asks DJI to do those things they will be happy to comply. They are just here to make money.

Steel manning this argument:

  Electronic warfare resistant loitering munitions. They would transmit sparse point clouds to the enemy for training.

Not saying I support it.

> Electronic warfare resistant loitering munitions

Most fpv drones don’t even have GNSS, they fly on acro mode or manual one, so that won’t prevent a “loitering munition”. Now for gnss denied autonomous navigation, Lidar isn’t the corner stone part, for indoor ones other sensors do well if not better like stereo cams, outdoor, you don’t need Lidar that much, but also you can use image based navigation, where it compares prestored images to land marks to navigate accurately. That being said, it’s not like Lidars are completely banned, you can buy one, 2d or 3d lidar, and equip it on your drone that you built, you don’t need dji to have it ready for you, so that ban won’t really mitigate any risk assuming there is one.

> They would transmit sparse point clouds to the enemy for training

Restricted facilities already restrict any kind of drone, other locations you can access these info without the need to transmit any point clouds data anyway.

How is this worse than 4k video, in this age of analytical abundance? The steel content of this argument is pretty low; it's essentially 'technology operates normally = national security risk.'

Why not ban pencils? You can draw maps or schematics of secret things, plus they can be used to stab people!

4k video is worthless compared to LiDAR. You are never going to get sub millisecond dead reckoning from video processing. Previously this required things like extremely expensive, export controlled ring laser gyroscopes (they do not drift and cannot be easily interfered with or jammed like the cheap IMU in your phone)

There are many more reasons LiDAR kicks ass but none of them have anything to do with why they are doing this.

>4k video is worthless compared to LiDAR.

You should do some more research into structure-from-motion and get back to us. Lidar is nice for real-time data, but these days anyone can process a 4k stream and get excellent geometry data.

Compare the energy cost of computation for SfM compared to sparse point cloud match

This is pretty marginal compared to the energy cost of keeping the drone and its payload in the air; also the original objection was that the data might get used for training, which can be an offline process. For example, you could fly a drone with 4k cameras around while navigating manually, then subsequently compute an environmental model from the recorded footage.

If a hypothetical hostile and weaponized drone is later deployed with a pretrained navigational model, it might have 4k and/or LIDAR whose function would be to verify rather than figure out navigation; in a state of hostility we can assume the owners of the drone would be indifferent to local rules.

You're not doing that to 4k60 in microsecond timeframes brother, especially not for driftless navigation

> 4k video is worthless compared to LiDAR. You are never going to get sub millisecond dead reckoning from video processing

Will America's foes heinously attack the homeland by offering socialistic self-driving vehicles? What exactly the threat model here, that makes Lidar data dangerous? Space-based remote sensing is superior in almost every way.

If I had to reach for something I would have to guess they're attempting to hinder their use in renewables. Generally speaking they are not too popular in weapons because shooting a bunch of lasers out of your nose is not exactly stealthy

Before we had these, wind farms used to have to poach cell phone tower guys to climb up every single one. Had a neighbor who did this, it pays insanely well but my palms sweat just thinking about it.

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/U1MigIJXJx8

The obvious concern would be China building high-res maps of every inch of US cities.

That boat has sailed for all of the countries that have the technological capability and it has gotten even better with the advent of AI because now you can correlate the information at a even higher level faster and that ability is only getting better every day.

In short, there are no real secrets geographically at least not for long. What’s more important is that you have the rare earth minerals inventory and even that is not a secret.

They already have that, and us maps of their country as well. Everyone has maps of everything at this point. If it's above ground then literally everyone that matters knows about it.

I don’t think that lidar maps are public knowledge. If they were why would Google be spending so much money creating their own?

This is not the same thing as taking a picture from a satellite.

I realize that. I didn't say "publicly available" but rather that anyone important has access to the information that they want. I expect that any exceptions to that can be trivially remedied on a case by case basis.

It's a matter of scale. Satellite imagery gets you most of the way there. I can think of only a very few instances where you'd care about higher resolution and those should be few enough that any well funded actor (ie the ones we care about here) can perform targeted data collection.

Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities? Or do you concede the point that they do not, in fact, have those yet?

Satellite does not get you most of the way there, the threat model here is military (drone) warfare where you would like 3d maps at high resolution. To me “Targeted collection” would look a lot like “backdoor some small % of the commercial drones we sell and siphon the data out”. You should check the Snowden files for the implant tech that NSA was putting in Cisco routers bound to China if you think this sounds far fetched.

> Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities?

I never claimed that - you aren't engaging with what I actually wrote.

I questioned the usefulness of such data in the general case. I also pointed out that in the rare cases where such data for a small area would prove useful it would be trivial to collect (on account of being a small area).

Just what sort of resolution do you believe is necessary or useful for drone warfare or other military uses? What do you have in mind here? Regardless, if I (a civilian) can afford the equipment and plane ticket to collect a LiDAR point cloud of a monument approximately anywhere in the world then any well funded actor can also send a "tourist" to do the same.

For that matter I don't think you even need LiDAR. Photogrammetry techniques can achieve arbitrarily high spatial resolution proportional to that of the input data. LiDAR just has some advantages if you're considering deploying on a wide scale or for certain realtime or power constrained tasks. Generally none of that applies to state actors.

Buy an iPhone, download an app (polycam, scaniverse, strayscanner, etc), build professional grade point clouds/maps. Technology itself is everywhere.

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