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How are you going to get your video feed out of the country remotely, and get the control signals into the country? It's not trivial at all. It's trivial-ish i

How are you going to get your video feed out of the country remotely, and get the control signals into the country? It's not trivial at all. It's trivial-ish if you're operating over a custom data link from a nearby location. The more remote the operator, the bigger the lag and the bigger the threat of signal loss. And you can't rely on the Internet because of lag and potential packet loss or congestion. It's hard enough to get everyone on the same screen in a Zoom meeting. Driving a car remotely and shooting at people over a patchy mobile data link is a whole other level of complexity.

radley 6y ago
Use a multi-cellular modem. Starsky Robotics remote-drove a truck (in the US) that way.
oh_sigh 6y ago
Bounce it off of a satellite, like on-location news broadcasts do? Those all operate out of a civilian style van with an antenna in it.
frankharv 6y ago
The Nissan was not driving remotely it was fixed on the side of the road. So signals needed to remotely fire gun and blow up truck. I wonder how they were able to get the scientists car to stop in the right area.
alacombe 6y ago
Zoom meetings carry HD video, generally both upstream and downstream. You hardly need 1080p 30pfs at a high bitrate to aim through crosshairs. You can totally split the feed to a low-resolution wide field of view (FOV) feed, then crop your feed to a low FOV once the target is acquired to enhanced apparent resolution. Common thermal scope are generally 320×240[0], and that's plenty to hunt at night. Reduce the frame rate to 15fps, and that's 54x less raw bandwidth, without accounting to whatever gains you can gain with H.264. I'd probably implement some sort of variable bitrate, aim to the general target direction with the high FOV low-resolution low-bitrate feed, then zoom to the crosshair section (low FOV, high resolution, even though the "effective" resolution is the same) and higher bitrate. [0: btw, I'm not not implying a thermal scope was used here, but simply drawing a parallel for comparison with off the shelf commonly used hunting equipment. If 320x240 is enough to kill a coyote at night at 100 yards, it's plenty to target a human. Not to mention full-auto fire will cause recoil and whack your aim, so you're not looking to repeat a 5-shot group within dime either, just shoot in the rough vicinity and spray the target with projectiles.] Also, the US army (not implying US involvement here) is piloting drone from the other side of the planet, so getting a signal out of a country is not very difficult.

radley 6y ago

Use a multi-cellular modem. Starsky Robotics remote-drove a truck (in the US) that way.

oh_sigh 6y ago

Bounce it off of a satellite, like on-location news broadcasts do? Those all operate out of a civilian style van with an antenna in it.

frankharv 6y ago

The Nissan was not driving remotely it was fixed on the side of the road. So signals needed to remotely fire gun and blow up truck. I wonder how they were able to get the scientists car to stop in the right area.

alacombe 6y ago

Zoom meetings carry HD video, generally both upstream and downstream. You hardly need 1080p 30pfs at a high bitrate to aim through crosshairs. You can totally split the feed to a low-resolution wide field of view (FOV) feed, then crop your feed to a low FOV once the target is acquired to enhanced apparent resolution. Common thermal scope are generally 320×240[0], and that's plenty to hunt at night. Reduce the frame rate to 15fps, and that's 54x less raw bandwidth, without accounting to whatever gains you can gain with H.264. I'd probably implement some sort of variable bitrate, aim to the general target direction with the high FOV low-resolution low-bitrate feed, then zoom to the crosshair section (low FOV, high resolution, even though the "effective" resolution is the same) and higher bitrate. [0: btw, I'm not not implying a thermal scope was used here, but simply drawing a parallel for comparison with off the shelf commonly used hunting equipment. If 320x240 is enough to kill a coyote at night at 100 yards, it's plenty to target a human. Not to mention full-auto fire will cause recoil and whack your aim, so you're not looking to repeat a 5-shot group within dime either, just shoot in the rough vicinity and spray the target with projectiles.] Also, the US army (not implying US involvement here) is piloting drone from the other side of the planet, so getting a signal out of a country is not very difficult.