I saw that too - I'm assuming it means they're indeed using the DNN for stabilization. This has been done several times over the years, but generally with results which only rival PID and don't surpass it, so that's quite interesting. What's odd is that the physical architecture of the drone doesn't really make sense for this, so there must be some tweaks beyond the "spec" model. Hopefully some papers come soon instead of press releases.

I assume that they shave off milliseconds by doing so, and a gyroscope (or similar) sends back the position/angle of the drone. And like this does it bypass the 'limited' onboard computer and instead uses a much better/faster computer?

> which have a payload and sometimes a fiber optic cable

The optic cable is for the human pilot. An AI piloted drone doesn't need it.

> I imagine the slower speed is a closer fit to combat drones

A lot of comments are trying to draw connections to combat drones, but drone racing like this has been a hobby thing for a long time. The capabilities of the drones are set to have an even playing field, not to match combat drones or anything.

These aren't meant to have any parallels to combat drones, drones that fly long distances, or drones that carry payloads.

It's really just a special-purpose hobby thing for flying through a series of gates very quickly. Flight time measured in a couple minutes, no provisions for carrying weight.

It’s DCL, they’re all kind of poor like this IMO. Certainly nothing like MultiGP

Right, that was my point about the physical layout not really being conducive to NN-driven stabilization, on my cursory read.

Digging in, you could probably bitbang DShot on Orin GPIOs. It would be really sketchy since it's presumably running Linux on out-of-order cores with giant cache, so there's nothing close to realtime going on, but it's so damn fast that the theoretical problem probably doesn't matter and I bet it would work fine.

Orin also has "safety island" for ASIL applications which has lockstep Cortex-R52s. This would be ideal to run an integrated flight controller RTOS but it's supposedly fused off on consumer boards, lame. There's also a Cortex-R5 called "SPE" that could probably run a flight control RTOS as well.

Regardless of all of this theory craft, I was either totally wrong or accidentally right in two ways, depending on how you want to look at it: according to a sibling post, the STM32 board actually runs the NN-backed stabilization loop rather than a PID one! I've seen this done in research before but never in a meaningfully successful way, so I'm even more impressed now - as far as I can tell, it's _two_ novel solves, an actually working PID-or-better NN-based stabilization system on STM32 _and_ inside-out vision based flight planning for racing on the Nvidia board.

Vonnegut’s bleakness is not theoretical which gives it a specific bite. As POV Vonnegut cleaned up the shriveled remains of civilian victims of firebombing.

Missed that news; https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/britain-p...

I think we're already deep into large-scale drone warfare. Destroying a third of the enemy heavy bomber fleet is pretty substantial. It feels to me like that attack operated like Pearl Harbor, a marker that the old way of surface naval warfare / air attack was being replaced by a new one.

Don't forget that Russia has their own drones. They were the first to deploy the fiber-optic cable drones as an anti-ECM measure. And of course both sides are ordering parts from China.

The UK has also released some details of a new 'in bulk' RF-based drone takedown DEW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vY5efYXMQ

100k kamikaze drones are not that many for the current stage of war. Millions are consumed annually.

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> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.

Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.

They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)

>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.

It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.

> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.

I agree with your other points, but this only helps with (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.

Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.

"And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing."

You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now, terrorists.

About your last paragraph: High level, I generally agree, but when you dive deeper to look at the numbers, I doubt that you can have 1000 USD drones that can fly at 200 mph/320 km/h. One quarter of that speed, I could believe.

I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie "Robot Jox".

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Fantastic book, highly recommended.

The conclusion is succinct and the stuff leading up to it of dubious quality.

"92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."

Combined arms is the probable solution for a Ukraine type war. As soon as your expensive laser lights up, it's got a couple of minutes to move before artillery shells arrive.

Of course deeper into Russia that's safe .. but instead you have the problem of a huge area to cover. You can protect a few high value targets but not everywhere. Consider something like the early stages of the Iraq war: target every single civilian electrical substation and petrol station with a drone bombing.

a laser needs a line of sight and dwell time. drones flying 3 ft off the ground, in between bushes and trees, at 100+ mph? not an easy situation.

ramp up power levels so dwell time might only be 1/2 second? maybe. but then there is a race for rapid target discrimination. and then ablative armor on the drones (cheap and easy to 3d print), and backup cameras, etc.

Yeah, an artillery strike, a smoke screen, or fog. I'm also reading the target needs to be stationary or its movements predictable; unpredictable evasive maneuvers should be easy enough to implement (at the cost of speed/range). Plus there's the cost of the device itself, while it says it costs $3 per shot, it's still an (up to) 100 kw device + sensors + power supply setup. It doesn't say how much the system itself costs or its maintenance.

The obvious counter to a laser could be 'more drones'? And maybe just have the drones sneak up close to the ground.

The problem is the asymmetry. Drones are cheap, can be produced in huge numbers, and can be deployed anywhere by anyone. You can't put laser defences on every target, and the best laser defence could still be overwhelmed by a sufficient number of drones.

I am fucking terrified of drones.

The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make.

We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.

The cat is definitely out of the bag.

I'm sure that everyone would agree on that, and that $bad_actor wouldn't take advantage of the fact that everyone else had agreed to lay down their arms. Game theory sucks, but it's hard to get around.

There wouldn't be any pin in it. Drones - automated weapons in the wide sense - will be the new MAD/equalizer weapon accessible to smaller countries who have no chances of getting into the nuclear club. Without such a weapon in the coming new world order - marked specifically by the USA's withdrawal from enforcing international law - they will be an easy prey to the bigger countries. Ukraine is just a preview of that equalizing power.

I guess it falls on me to break it to you then but serious "global talks" happen at the exploding end of ordinance.

There is no Jedi Council to appeal to, no wise group of non-aggressive nations gathering to pacify the troublemakers.

why? if nuclear weapons got the green light, do you expect a different outcome?

As if the billionaires won't simply go "F that noise, more money for me!!!" Ethical concerns are way down the priority list for most AI focused companies.

No, only our rulers will be anonymous.

We'll simply never know who we're being ruled by.

There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones.

A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target.

Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.

Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment.

Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here.

Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.

Are you sure?

One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems.

Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.

An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1].

"Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology."

[1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...

Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.

There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.

Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.

I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.

The seeds of the Butlerian Jihad

As long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!

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-That you know of.

> A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast.

I'm having a hard time believing this is effective.

> The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage

Russians don't care about collateral damage and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of them using such weapons?

You could do EMP, but you could also do some sort of point-defense turret. Drones are lightweight and fragile, so it doesn't need to be big - just fast and auto-targeting.

Fire departments and police in Germany are deploying more and more drone units, too.

Firefighters use them to search for missing persons but also to get aerial images and a better overview of larger scenes as "running around" is often not possible or doesn't help that much with the overview.

Police is using them to take pictures of accidents. It's easier to see tire marks and the whole "history" of an accident from above. Really reduces their time on a scenery to take pictures of everything.

I've always thought a user-installable drone-pad in the style of a window AC unit would be the ideal.

If by burrito you mean shaped charge high explosives with lethal shrapnel, triggered by facial recognition, delivered by drones the size of house sparrows at the speed of sound, then yes, burrito delivery.

In china probably very soon. In the US? Regulation has already killed that.

>I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone.

The cost of a FPV quadcopter is pennies on the dollar cost of a defense system. You can 3D print a dozen frames in hours with a decent printer. Its just bolt on the parts and do a quick function test with a script or controller and its ready for action.

What point are you trying to make. Because the iron dome is hideously expensive. It costs so much more then the missiles it intercepts that it's worth it for terrorists to fire on israel purely to waste their money.

The iranian icbms from Yemen gets shot down by other systems. I don't think they are scaled up versions of the iron dome. What's interesting is the lack of confidence israel has in predicting their trajectory. They usually send up multiple interceptors for a single missile and put sirens on for half the country.

The only really economical counter i've heard of is lasers but it doesn't look like they are coming any time soon.

I've got no idea what method Israel uses to counter drones, but they certainly have struggled with them.

My absolute nightmare scenario is Iran via its proxies unleashing swarms of autonomous kamikaze drones in population centres.

Do you happen to know the bandwidth of the telemetry fed to the network? How many bytes/s.

Human sports remain interesting when the humans are notably worse at whatever they do than a machine purpose built for it, or indeed wildlife that specialised for this.

Usain Bolt was the fastest human sprinter in the world, but compared to a good motorcycle over paved road he's obviously not very fast, and likewise compared to an emu. Nevertheless, Bolt's 100m performance drew big crowds, even though people also watch Motorcycle racing and (I think?) Emu racing.

It's like speed running, the categories are arbitrary and self-selecting. Why the Modern Pentathlon? Why not. Why Super Mario Warpless? Why not. If everybody wanted to do Super Mario, only the odd numbered levels and also you must kill all the enemies, that's what the run is, our choices are arbitrary and we value whatever we like.

Yes. People thought computers would kill chess, but despite current chess engines being able to trounce every human in existence, chess is more popular than ever.

similar to drag racing i guess.

I don't think so. The article says the race track was controlled by the race organisers but not that it wasn't known to the participants before the race.

Anyway given the state of the art, flying autonomously at great speeds and beating human champions without pre-training, i.e. on an unknown race track, would be a much bigger breakthrough than just beating some human champions (which has already happened except in a less official environment). You can rest assured that if that was what the team achieved, the article would be telling us all about it.

I have been involved in research focused on ML control for some time, and believe me, I would love to see an AI model capable of controlling arbitrary systems at different operating points or in different environments. However, it is simply not feasible yet. This AI drone is no different, especially because reinforcement learning was used to train the model, which is generally not practical for real-world systems due to disturbance variables and the continuous need for adaptability.

Tell that to the Ukrainians who fight the brutal war Russia are waging:

https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-commanders-exclu...

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE

I’m reminded of when the US military figured out it should just replace all its proprietary field drone controllers with Xbox controllers because every single grunt that enlisted already had 10,000 hours on the things. If the future of warfare is drones, Christ, that video is terrifying.

Why? Just request a Waymo, and then put your suitcase nuke in the backseat and watch it be delivered by AI. There's all sorts of ways to kill with AI without needing drones

Yeah I man with each day the chance of a shocking event increases to 100% with predictable outcomes. But yeah thats what I'm thinking of .. there has to be a finite number of dimensions for this and related technologies in terms of use and impact (legal, economics, PR, military, political etc), some are fuzzier than others but some should be pretty clear for some analyst to share..

I kind of prefer this, even without bombs i dont want unregulated idiots dropping a drone on my head in an urban space.

My first worry wouldn't be this.

I got out of doing drone work because of all the FAA restrictions on where you can fly drones now. Within 30 miles of a major metro area? Nope. Within 20 miles of an airport? Nope. I'm exaggerating of course, but it got to a point where I was having real problems trying to find areas where you can fly a drone just for fun so I just gave up and quit.

My more immediate fear would be how the gov can control who and where these drones will be able to fly. If some revolutionary built a swarm of drones, it would be pretty easy (I would think) for the gov to just jam the signal and shut them down.

The parts? I'm not worried about. Its the gov holding the keys to access that makes me more worried.

This is that. This race used only a single forward-facing camera and IMU fed to an onboard Orin NX.

What do you mean just wait until? The entire point of TFA is that AI is controlling the motors directly and not using some human input device. So I guess it's just wait until you actually read TFA and watch the embedded video?

>>Just wait until these things can move through space with physical/gyro sensors on their own,

and better guidance software. Yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement

"Traditional waypoint navigation assumes movement through a series of Cartesian positions. But in pursuit dynamics, for example, what matters is directional alignment over time"

https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep/blob/main/docs/01-ratio...