Posted by _tk_ 6 days ago
FPVs are man portable guided munitions, not artillery. Pretty much all existing man portable guided anti tank weapons are better than FPVs at their job.
And artillery is better than any of them at it's job. While FPVs can score kills they have minimal suppression effects, when an FPV hits a friendly, everyone else is going to keep moving, because stopping will offer them no benefit from the next one, and the next one might be minutes out. When an artillery round lands everyone hits the deck.
Also these are immature tech... I suspect at least some of the issues identified will be mitigated in time.
Sure, but a Javelin missile costs more than $200K. You can have 200 fpv drones for that price.
Heck, I could build that with hugginface (I will never do that) in a few evenings if you are ok to blow up the wrong target with a single digit percentage.
This gave me the somewhat macabre image of Ukrainian and Russian drones doing automated frequency coordination with each other, so they can orderly proceed in bombing each other's soldiers.
I don't think that's what happens though. But I'm surprised flying drones in the same area as enemy operators is even possible. Wouldn't both sides try to jam or take over each other's signals, deliberately blocking channels, etc - so that in the end, no one could control anything?
Or, if the signals are really unencrypted, what keeps anyone from setting up a radio beacon that just spams the "detonate now" signal on all channels at maximum power. Instant drone-free zone?
My first thought was, why not use the easier mode (press forward to go forward, back to go back, etc.)? But looking at those war videos, these drones always come at an angle towards the target. And in that sense, it's easier to use the more difficult helicopter mode. What I mean is, once you know the helicopter mode, it's easier to do this kind of maneuver than using the "easy mode".
> As a result, training a highly proficient operator can take months. A standard, base-level course for Ukrainian drone pilots takes about five weeks
Only then can CV do the last part ("terminal engagement"). But that also means it won't go inside a hangar and find the target there.
I don't think we're anywhere near having drones that happily fly above a war zone, detect an interesting hangar, find a way to get inside and select a target inside.
Currently they mostly fly FPV drones manually. The next basic step is to have "terminal engagement", where at some point they can select a target and the drone will fly autonomously to it using CV. But in order to do that, the drone will need processing power, and therefore it won't cost 500$ anymore.
Would you rather go for a drone that costs 5k and can use CV for terminal engagement, or 10 drones that cost 500 and simply stay on their latest vector if no command arrives?
Again I think people overestimate how much compute this takes and underestimate how cheap embedded compute has gotten.
Then you have to integrate that RPi to the drone, both mechanically and software-wise. From YOLO, you need to actually get into commands for the autopilot. There is work involved.
And another question is: can you order millions of RPis like this? If not, what is the cost of alternatives?
Not saying it's impossible, just saying that people tend to underestimate those questions. I know it from experience, I have seen projects fail because of that.
The important point in this is the drone will explode before it could reach anything not a target. It can sometimes find a better target than a pattern. In the ideal case you might fly it all the way, but if you lose radio over enemy territory anything the drone can find needs to die anyway so it may as well attempt to find something and kill it.
It's useful for the fiber powered ones that can loiter indefinitely watching out for other drones and then go chase them.