7 ms·

Technology like this is why The Wall is a waste of money when it comes to deterring drug trafficking.

beagle3 8y ago
The technology world progresses as an arms race. I'm quite sure that when these things are used to traffic drugs, a small version of [0] will be used to stop them. [0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neqvag/the-us-navy-bought-its-first-big-laser-cannon https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neqvag/the-us-nav...
- candiodari 8y ago
  Heh, that's cute. The issue with that is that locating UAV's that are, say 50 meters above the deck, more than 1km from your detector is essentially impossible. Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen. Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. Third. Defense against a laser is easy (a mirror, essentially, though you need to know the frequency to get an effective one). I must say that I don't know why you'd try to defend a drone. I'd try to hide it, since that's so easy. And while a rules-based autopilot is easy to disrupt using jamming, a learned autopilot is essentially impossible to fool into crashing. Maybe you can divert it, I guess.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    > Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen. Not really, Where it matters, radars have been deployed that can easily find those things. I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then. IIRC it was a SAR system, but I'm not sure. > Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. There are newer, weaker versions that are at ~$1/shot, that would still likely take down your average drone. Also, even $600 is not "far more" expensive than a modern drone that can carry things across the border; It is slightly more expensive, but (relatively speaking), super cheap and, since it is energy, fungible (that is, you don't spend it until you spend it, unlike e.g. missiles which have to be ready long beforehand) > Defense against a laser is easy (a mirror, essentially, though you need to know the frequency to get an effective one). I must say that I don't know why you'd try to defend a drone. I'd try to hide it, since that's so easy. That's the popular belief, but it is not actually true. A perfect mirror such as would be required would cost today significantly more than the drone itself, as in x10 to x100, if it is at all feasible (You can't have sharp edges, you likely need glass). It is currently infeasible to mirror-cover missiles or rockets that cost a lot more than the drone, and the problems are (mostly) not about the projectile speed or heat. > And while a rules-based autopilot is easy to disrupt using jamming, a learned autopilot is essentially impossible to fool into crashing. Maybe you can divert it, I guess. Lasers can blind cameras even better than they do human eyes. What sensors is this autopilot going to depend on when it is vision and GPS blinded?
    - woodman 8y ago
      > I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then. Yup, long stare SAR hooked up to a DVR was a thing over 10 years ago - it could cover a lot of ground (like a large Iraqi city) with a resolution that would easily detect this drone.
      - candiodari 8y ago
        Are these the overhead not-quite-satellites you're talking about ? That would require a drone every 5 km or so. Not - one drone. A drone in the air 24/7 every 5km for a border ~2000 km long.
        beagle3 8y ago
        The system I saw 30 years ago were more ground based and covered tens to hundreds of KMs. But even if you need a drone every 5km (you don't). That's all of 400 drones, 800 if you want to have pairs doing charge-work duty. For an 2000km border guarding operation, that's really not much. An order of magnitude or two cheaper than the fence they would guard.
        candiodari 8y ago
        How did that ground based system solve the horizon problem ? Drones don't fly very high, so you'd need one of these systems, say at 50 meters drone height, ~ every 50km. That's probably worse than those drones watching from above, seeing as you'd need actual infrastructure at every interval. And, that'd be fixed infrastructure, with fixed blind spots.
        beagle3 8y ago
        I don't know exactly how it worked (beyond IIRC that it was a SAR = Synthetic Aperature Radar), but I know for sure that it worked perfectly well.
        8y ago
  - MikkoFinell 8y ago
    > Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. What is the approximate cost of allowing the drone in?
    - zdkl 8y ago
      Depends if we assume they're smuggling or dropping explosives/something dirty.
      - MikkoFinell 8y ago
        Suppose they are smuggling narcotics.
        candiodari 8y ago
        Okay, since economics has extensively studied the effect of narcotics on the economy (which is positive, or to put it another way: people will work, even fight, for drugs), we can clearly establish that the cost of missing a shipment is negative. For the economy, it is actually better to miss the shipment than to catch it.
        MikkoFinell 8y ago
        So allowing Mexican cartels to smuggle and sell, for example, heroin has a positive economic effect on society? I have to admit that's a fresh perspective.
        candiodari 8y ago
        But you neglect to take into account the perspective I mentioned. Heroin certainly makes money go round and therefore helps GDP. We just, as a society, have decided that the social cost is not worth it.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. Where are you getting that $600 number? The laser in the article quoted is 150kW, which firing for a fraction of a second would be no more than a few dollars electricity.
icelancer 8y ago
Catapults alone are good enough technology to prove why the wall is an idiotic idea. The wall is an effigy anyway for Trump, while he may actually believe that it's a good idea, that's not how it functions in reality. It's an anchor, a symbol, a thing to point to that combats illegal immigration and is a symbol of nationalism. Now Trump might actually think it's a good idea - and I actually think he does - so that's absurd. But realistically it operates as a political beacon, and one that's quite effective.
- candiodari 8y ago
  Apparently, indeed: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/15/us/marijuana-catapult-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/15/us/marijuana-catapult-trn...
ShorsHammer 8y ago
Jamming drones is easier than you think, the new battleground will be autonomous flying to avoid trivial radio/gps jamming. MIT has open source code for this already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qah8oIzCwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qah8oIzCwk https://github.com/andybarry/flight https://github.com/andybarry/flight
- a012 8y ago
  I'm no expert but how autonomous works if there's no positioning methods involved? (To avoid GPS/GLONASS,... Jamming)
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    Fused dead reckoning can work, especially if you mix camera and IMU (or more than one IMU!).
  - candiodari 8y ago
    See the paper, but TLDR: stereo video depth sensing combined with fading previous measurements (so if you detected an obstacle at 1 o'clock, 2 meters out 1 second ago, it is now very likely at 2 o'clock, 1.3 meters out. This way you can limit yourself to just detecting things 2 meters out)
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Cruise missiles have an optical terrain-following system, that would be a viable approach for drones.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      They use radar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
  - omegant 8y ago
    Inertial navigation and maps.
  - 8y ago
blfr 8y ago
I doubt this is true. There is a readily available technology for beating greylisting for example. Any semi-configured mail server can do it. Yet greylisting alone stops majority of spam. I expect the same effect for drug or people trafficking. While no barrier will stop everyone, and there are already drones and submarines designed for crossing well-protected borders, even fairly simple obstacles will stop or deter the majority of traffickers.
ferongr 8y ago
You can shoot at drones with impunity, unlike people that you have to feed, house, process and eventually extradict if that's even possible.
- simonh 8y ago
  She the whole wall is going to be manned with anti-drone squads? If you’re manning the border, why do you need such a huge wall? Wouldn’t a fence provide better visibility?
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    Fence and tethered ballons with sensor packages underneath every few miles. You have issues with weather affecting coverage but it would be a lot cheaper than a massive ineffective wall.
    - simonh 8y ago
      So now we have hundreds of monitors checking wobbly camera images all the time trying to spot tiny drones in all weather and all times of day. How often do balloons need refilling? Aren’t balloons highly visible and extremely vulnerable? Has anything like this ever even been tried in practice?
      - timmaah 8y ago
        Been tried and working for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System
        simonh 8y ago
        That's a high altitude aircraft defence system. We're discussing low altitude terrain level drones the size of a shoebox operating up to maybe 100m altitude, just enough to pop up over the wall. Air defence radar like that is going to be completely useless for this.
spodek 8y ago
> Technology like this is why The Wall is a waste of money when it comes to deterring drug trafficking. One of many many reasons. While it's sufficient, it's far from the top of the list.
state_less 8y ago
The war on drugs has been a big self inflicted wound. Including building a billions dollar wall to supposedly keep drugs (and people) out. If we sold the real thing under the prescription of a doctor or nurse technician, you wouldn’t fuel drug lords, deadly look-a-like drugs, deadly cutting agents and overdoses due to potency variability. That’s a better way to manage drug use than putting up walls and laws and pretending criminality matters to a dependent drug addicts.
dghughes 8y ago
You know it's funny with the way it is in the US I see it more as you walling yourself in than keeping others out. We gunless, pot smoking, socialized medicine, immigrant accepting countries are on the "outside". I do say that with tongue in cheek.

The technology world progresses as an arms race. I'm quite sure that when these things are used to traffic drugs, a small version of [0] will be used to stop them. [0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neqvag/the-us-navy-bought-its-first-big-laser-cannon https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/neqvag/the-us-nav...

candiodari 8y ago
Heh, that's cute. The issue with that is that locating UAV's that are, say 50 meters above the deck, more than 1km from your detector is essentially impossible. Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen. Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. Third. Defense against a laser is easy (a mirror, essentially, though you need to know the frequency to get an effective one). I must say that I don't know why you'd try to defend a drone. I'd try to hide it, since that's so easy. And while a rules-based autopilot is easy to disrupt using jamming, a learned autopilot is essentially impossible to fool into crashing. Maybe you can divert it, I guess.
- beagle3 8y ago
  > Without a VERY dense detection infrastructure, catching these things is not going to happen. Not really, Where it matters, radars have been deployed that can easily find those things. I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then. IIRC it was a SAR system, but I'm not sure. > Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. There are newer, weaker versions that are at ~$1/shot, that would still likely take down your average drone. Also, even $600 is not "far more" expensive than a modern drone that can carry things across the border; It is slightly more expensive, but (relatively speaking), super cheap and, since it is energy, fungible (that is, you don't spend it until you spend it, unlike e.g. missiles which have to be ready long beforehand) > Defense against a laser is easy (a mirror, essentially, though you need to know the frequency to get an effective one). I must say that I don't know why you'd try to defend a drone. I'd try to hide it, since that's so easy. That's the popular belief, but it is not actually true. A perfect mirror such as would be required would cost today significantly more than the drone itself, as in x10 to x100, if it is at all feasible (You can't have sharp edges, you likely need glass). It is currently infeasible to mirror-cover missiles or rockets that cost a lot more than the drone, and the problems are (mostly) not about the projectile speed or heat. > And while a rules-based autopilot is easy to disrupt using jamming, a learned autopilot is essentially impossible to fool into crashing. Maybe you can divert it, I guess. Lasers can blind cameras even better than they do human eyes. What sensors is this autopilot going to depend on when it is vision and GPS blinded?
  - woodman 8y ago
    > I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then. Yup, long stare SAR hooked up to a DVR was a thing over 10 years ago - it could cover a lot of ground (like a large Iraqi city) with a resolution that would easily detect this drone.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      Are these the overhead not-quite-satellites you're talking about ? That would require a drone every 5 km or so. Not - one drone. A drone in the air 24/7 every 5km for a border ~2000 km long.
      - beagle3 8y ago
        The system I saw 30 years ago were more ground based and covered tens to hundreds of KMs. But even if you need a drone every 5km (you don't). That's all of 400 drones, 800 if you want to have pairs doing charge-work duty. For an 2000km border guarding operation, that's really not much. An order of magnitude or two cheaper than the fence they would guard.
        candiodari 8y ago
        How did that ground based system solve the horizon problem ? Drones don't fly very high, so you'd need one of these systems, say at 50 meters drone height, ~ every 50km. That's probably worse than those drones watching from above, seeing as you'd need actual infrastructure at every interval. And, that'd be fixed infrastructure, with fixed blind spots.
        beagle3 8y ago
        I don't know exactly how it worked (beyond IIRC that it was a SAR = Synthetic Aperature Radar), but I know for sure that it worked perfectly well.
      - 8y ago
- MikkoFinell 8y ago
  > Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. What is the approximate cost of allowing the drone in?
  - zdkl 8y ago
    Depends if we assume they're smuggling or dropping explosives/something dirty.
    - MikkoFinell 8y ago
      Suppose they are smuggling narcotics.
      - candiodari 8y ago
        Okay, since economics has extensively studied the effect of narcotics on the economy (which is positive, or to put it another way: people will work, even fight, for drugs), we can clearly establish that the cost of missing a shipment is negative. For the economy, it is actually better to miss the shipment than to catch it.
        MikkoFinell 8y ago
        So allowing Mexican cartels to smuggle and sell, for example, heroin has a positive economic effect on society? I have to admit that's a fresh perspective.
        candiodari 8y ago
        But you neglect to take into account the perspective I mentioned. Heroin certainly makes money go round and therefore helps GDP. We just, as a society, have decided that the social cost is not worth it.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves. Where are you getting that $600 number? The laser in the article quoted is 150kW, which firing for a fraction of a second would be no more than a few dollars electricity.

icelancer 8y ago

Catapults alone are good enough technology to prove why the wall is an idiotic idea. The wall is an effigy anyway for Trump, while he may actually believe that it's a good idea, that's not how it functions in reality. It's an anchor, a symbol, a thing to point to that combats illegal immigration and is a symbol of nationalism. Now Trump might actually think it's a good idea - and I actually think he does - so that's absurd. But realistically it operates as a political beacon, and one that's quite effective.

candiodari 8y ago
Apparently, indeed: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/15/us/marijuana-catapult-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/15/us/marijuana-catapult-trn...

ShorsHammer 8y ago

Jamming drones is easier than you think, the new battleground will be autonomous flying to avoid trivial radio/gps jamming. MIT has open source code for this already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qah8oIzCwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qah8oIzCwk https://github.com/andybarry/flight https://github.com/andybarry/flight

a012 8y ago
I'm no expert but how autonomous works if there's no positioning methods involved? (To avoid GPS/GLONASS,... Jamming)
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Fused dead reckoning can work, especially if you mix camera and IMU (or more than one IMU!).
- candiodari 8y ago
  See the paper, but TLDR: stereo video depth sensing combined with fading previous measurements (so if you detected an obstacle at 1 o'clock, 2 meters out 1 second ago, it is now very likely at 2 o'clock, 1.3 meters out. This way you can limit yourself to just detecting things 2 meters out)
- pjc50 8y ago
  Cruise missiles have an optical terrain-following system, that would be a viable approach for drones.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    They use radar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
- omegant 8y ago
  Inertial navigation and maps.
- 8y ago

blfr 8y ago

I doubt this is true. There is a readily available technology for beating greylisting for example. Any semi-configured mail server can do it. Yet greylisting alone stops majority of spam. I expect the same effect for drug or people trafficking. While no barrier will stop everyone, and there are already drones and submarines designed for crossing well-protected borders, even fairly simple obstacles will stop or deter the majority of traffickers.

ferongr 8y ago

You can shoot at drones with impunity, unlike people that you have to feed, house, process and eventually extradict if that's even possible.

simonh 8y ago
She the whole wall is going to be manned with anti-drone squads? If you’re manning the border, why do you need such a huge wall? Wouldn’t a fence provide better visibility?
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Fence and tethered ballons with sensor packages underneath every few miles. You have issues with weather affecting coverage but it would be a lot cheaper than a massive ineffective wall.
  - simonh 8y ago
    So now we have hundreds of monitors checking wobbly camera images all the time trying to spot tiny drones in all weather and all times of day. How often do balloons need refilling? Aren’t balloons highly visible and extremely vulnerable? Has anything like this ever even been tried in practice?
    - timmaah 8y ago
      Been tried and working for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System
      - simonh 8y ago
        That's a high altitude aircraft defence system. We're discussing low altitude terrain level drones the size of a shoebox operating up to maybe 100m altitude, just enough to pop up over the wall. Air defence radar like that is going to be completely useless for this.

spodek 8y ago

> Technology like this is why The Wall is a waste of money when it comes to deterring drug trafficking. One of many many reasons. While it's sufficient, it's far from the top of the list.

state_less 8y ago

The war on drugs has been a big self inflicted wound. Including building a billions dollar wall to supposedly keep drugs (and people) out. If we sold the real thing under the prescription of a doctor or nurse technician, you wouldn’t fuel drug lords, deadly look-a-like drugs, deadly cutting agents and overdoses due to potency variability. That’s a better way to manage drug use than putting up walls and laws and pretending criminality matters to a dependent drug addicts.

dghughes 8y ago

You know it's funny with the way it is in the US I see it more as you walling yourself in than keeping others out. We gunless, pot smoking, socialized medicine, immigrant accepting countries are on the "outside". I do say that with tongue in cheek.