12 ms·
Swarming drones autonomously navigate a dense forest
- wiz21c 5y agoSomehow I was expecting the swarm to fly much faster... Still impressive though.
- vsgzusnex 5y agoClosest thing the DoD has for swarming drones right now. Mostly focused on indoor exploration currently. https://shield.ai/products/nova-class https://shield.ai/products/nova-class
- l33tman 5y agoI would like to take the time to discuss how humanity can make a drone swarm that can fly through a dense bamboo-forest with 30 cm spacing of the trees but fail to make a video player that have any type of time controls in 2022...
- stjo 5y agoWill and initiatives
- na85 5y agoMaybe Ocarina of Time was oddly prescient and we'll soon have little quadcopters following us around saying "Hey! Listen!" to alert us to fairly-obvious details.
- mdonahoe 5y agoLife imitates art.
- choxi 5y agoArt imitates nature. All ideas are remixes of previous ideas, and ideas are ultimately rooted in observations from nature. A human mind in a vacuum wouldn’t be able to create anything.
- Zensynthium 5y agoI can see it haha
- emmelaich 5y agoYou can go back to Vernor Vinge's "Realtime" series. Nearing the singularity, most people have their own personal defence drone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge#Realtime/Bobble_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge#Realtime/Bobble_s...
- rnk 5y agoVernor Vinge's work is amazing. In the story "A fire upon the deep" he introduces the most amazing concepts, and there's a realistic way that an AI reboots itself after being in cold storage, there's a Usenet communication between civilizations, and the most impressive was an idea that there's regions in the universe where the speed of light is faster and brains work at a higher rate. It's an amazing work. Later he comes up with the prescient "focus factor" in the sequel.
- soco 5y agoThere's also this entertaining Brazilian series on Netflix - Omniscient (Onisciente) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11542920/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11542920/
- echelon 5y agoAnother N64 title, Jet Force Gemini, had exactly that [1]! [1] https://youtu.be/m-_0gOM2iRg?t=245 https://youtu.be/m-_0gOM2iRg?t=245
- RealityVoid 5y agoCan't wait to get drone-slapped!
- KirbyShoots556 5y agoI want video
- peppertree 5y agoActual paper has video. http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abm5954 http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abm5954
- ajmurmann 5y ago2 years from now the sequel: https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM
- Markoff 5y agoand you can't skip through the video, there are literally zero controls besides pause/play, so don't bother wasting your time, I think I haven't seen such bad player in years
- eurekin 5y agoI scrolled through the page multiple times, came back here to double check that it actually contains a video and only after that I found it
- Liquid_Fire 5y agoTo re-enable the native browser controls, run this in your browser's dev tools console: Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName("video")).forEach(x => x.setAttribute("controls", ""))
- throwamon 5y agoOh, and it's DRM-protected, too! We truly live in the future.
- dredmorbius 5y agoIf anyone happens to know the Brightcove video API Account: 53038991001 Video 1 ID: 6305520207112 Video 2 ID: 6305519415112 API: https://apis.support.brightcove.com/playback/getting-started/overview-playback-api.html#Get_video_by_id https://apis.support.brightcove.com/playback/getting-started... For request video by ID: https://edge.api.brightcove.com/playback/v1/accounts/{account_id}/videos/{video_id} https://edge.api.brightcove.com/playback/v1/accounts/{accoun... Let's try: https://edge.api.brightcove.com/playback/v1/accounts/53038991001/videos/6305520207112 https://edge.api.brightcove.com/playback/v1/accounts/5303899... No joy for me, seems to want a request-policy-key, but if someone else wants to take a stab...
- dhurve 5y ago
- javajosh 5y agoWhat could possibly go wrong?
- dmje 5y agoSo very glad I'll be dead in 50 years.
- dmje 5y ago
- rejor121 5y agoSo when do I get to purchase my own swarm of defense drones? Cuz we will probably need them in a few years at this rate of improvement
- surfsvammel 5y agoSuper cool! Hope we can use this technology to look for missing people.
- Andaith 5y agoWow, a positive use for this technology! Nice! I couldn't think of any use for it other than hunting the last few humans living off of nuts & berries to extinction as part of the machine uprising.
- stephenanand 5y ago[flagged]
- vmception 5y ago> We’ve all seen enough movies to know this is how it starts … but of course it could be useful in rescue or combat circumstances as well. Uhhh the latter is exactly what we're worried about
- alimov 5y agoImage caption from the article: “No escape for you, target human. Image Credits: Zhou et al”
- atoav 5y agoThe question we engineers should keep in mind is: Traditionally it has been very hard to force the will of the few onto the many, without at least having some of those many taking part in the game. There are technologies with the potential to massively alter that equation. If you develop such a technology like this one you can be sure it might be used precisely for this purpose: powerful men now need fewer poor men to stay in power. Maybe it is me living in Germany, but the imagination how the Nazis would have put to use the technology we are currently developing makes me shiver. Many of us create technology as if our democracies are built forever. And they are — until they are not. Or they are not — but not where we live, so we don't care. I get, that it is hard to find any technology that couldn't in some way be abused in a horrendous fashion by the next authotarian society — however there certainly is a gradient there. And we decide where we feel comfortable to put ourselves.
- imtringued 5y agoWe are building ever more precise weapons with less and less collateral damage and you are worried about evil people using the precise ones? It sounds like you are making the argument that collateral damage will make people more likely to rebel against an authoritarian regimes. Is that actually true?
- DeWilde 5y agoThe trouble is, there are undemocratic societies where this is being built as well. This drone swarm is actually from China. The reasons why we build these systems is to prevent the undemocratic societies gaining power over us. The threat of our own societies becoming undemocratic doesn't feel as pressing as the threat of undemocratic societies that exist today. The atomic bomb is a good example, a lot of the scientist working on it wouldn't have if there weren't fears that Nazi Germany was going to build it first. This also reminds of the prisoners dilemma. If both parties choose not to build these systems we would be all fine, if one builds it and the others doesn't the other is screwed. If both build it they are both screwed but not as much.
- jp0d 5y agoI can't help but look at this thing with nothing but cynicism. While `surfsvammel` has given one scenario where it could be useful in a positive way, I think the negative aspects of this far outweighs the positives.
- hibernator149 5y agoEverytime someone says: "Our robot/drone can be used for finding hidden people in hard to reach locations" the cynic in me thinks that these are just codewords for: "Our killbots will revolutionize the urban battlefield. DoD please fund us". Can someone please prove me wrong?
- frozenport 5y agoNot obvious if tiny drones pack enough heat to be relevant in an urban battlefield scenario or if they are actually useful compared to conventional approaches.
- edf13 5y agoA swam of tiny drones could easily overwhelm an enemy.... Lots of options. If against personel they just kamikaze in... if against armoured targets a small explosive charge on a hundred or so drones could easily destroy a target.
- frozenport 5y agoWhat if they run against a wall?
- flir 5y agoSwarm of cheap drones blankets area. When an individual drone finds a target it requests an artillery strike (or similar) on its own location. There's something about the swarming nature of these things that makes them even more unsettling.
- jl6 5y agoThey’re big enough to carry a blinding laser and a computer capable of face recognition. Expect urban defence to feature a lot of nets in the near future.
- ceejayoz 5y agoDo a Google search for drone propeller injuries. Those are accidental; now envision 20 of them working intentionally to slice you apart with the props. They don’t really need armament to maim and kill.
- l33tman 5y agoAnnoying techcrunch links, they go directly to guce.advertising.com to turn around, but the turn doesn't work with things like uMatrix so you just get stuck.. :/
- dredmorbius 5y agohttps://archive.ph/FybGv https://archive.ph/FybGv
- uvesten 5y agoI wonder about the psychology of the people (researchers) working on "innovations" such as these (other things also come to mind, e.g. face detection in crowds, optimizing fragment distribution from bomb/granade explosions). Are they just extremely myopic, and cannot see the consequences of their work at all? Or naive, in that they only can imagine the positive use cases? ...or (to simplify) are they evil and fully understand and welcome the terrifying outcomes?
- DeWilde 5y agoI fully understand the terrifying outcomes but would have no problem building these systems to act as deterrent, or counter-force, to the people who would use these "innovations" for evil purposes. So there is a third option, alongside your original two.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- maybeOneDay 5y agoName a country that develops high tech weaponry and doesn't do one of the two: - Use it for evil purposes - Sell it to other nations that then use it for evil purposes Anyone involved in the defence industry is complicit in the death of innocents, your third option is a fallacy.
- dougabug 5y agoBut you presumably rely on your own nation’s military to help protect and safeguard your rights, freedoms, even your life. Without drone and anti-tank / aircraft missiles, Ukraine would already be lost, and Putin would be on to his next conquest. If we agree to allow our own soldiers to risk their lives to defend us, then we are morally obligated to provide them with the best protection we can provide for them. That’s a choice: we could choose to not support our soldiers, but then we should forego the right to be protected by them.
- 5y ago
- mothsonasloth 5y agoI wonder if chaff or some sort of ferrous dustcloud could disable swarms?
- shapefrog 5y agoIt appears they are just using cameras. Nevertheless rolls of tinfoil will come in handy for the zombie robot apocalypse so make sure you have some handy.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago> It appears they are just using cameras Deploy the Tactical Trompe-l'œil
- shapefrog 5y agoWile E Coyote was a master of this.
- d--b 5y agoPeople in the drone industry have a very weak definition of density! Sure, this could be useful if your forest is made of 3ft-spaced branchless bamboos, with no bushes or anything else to hit.
- uwagar 5y agothey are coming to deliver much needed vaxxines to the unvaxxed.
- alexalx 5y agoIf you play opening sequence of Terminator you will notice that the weapons used are exactly what makes sense to deploy against Russia - Ai orchestrated drones, hi power laser (Raphael Tech) turrets mounted on autonomous vehicles. We just need to connect everything to supercomputer to come up with attack strategies in real time based on vast amounts of sensor data
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago> are exactly what makes sense to deploy against Russia Not sure why you think a bunch of ground drones are useful against ICBMs.
- sangnoir 5y agoIf the drones have lasers that are powerful and accurate enough[1], they can be very useful against ICBMs on a ballistic trajectory. 1. The navy is already testing ground-based lasers powerful enough to destroy drones and light aircraft.
- greggsy 5y agoI’m not sure if this is satire, but everything you’ve written is a terrible idea. Expanding from Baktyar drones to autonomous ground weapons and lasers sounds ‘connected to a supercomputer’ sounds like a way to escalate the situation both within Ukraine, and to the rest of the connected community.
- tsaoyu 5y agoI can understand the concerns of the technology might be abused in DoD but I should point out that it is much better to see this result on Science Robotics, TRO, ICRA, and IROS etc. Military is behind many technology innovations but this doesn't mean all technologies should be used for military purpose only. The work done is by: http://zju-fast.com/ http://zju-fast.com/ Disclaimer: Roboticist, have worked with fast-lab on World Robotics Sailing Championship
- stavros 5y ago> I can understand the concerns of the technology might be abused in DoD Technology getting abused by the DoD is "fine". Technology that has very few applications outside the DoD is less fine.
- tsaoyu 5y agoAgree, aerial vehicles are slightly better than maritime vehicles in this sense. I left maritime robotics because I couldn’t find any decent paying job that is not defense related :( What we can do as a student team is to open-source it.
- EGreg 5y agoSlaughterbots are coming closer…
- pasabagi 5y agoAre all weapons by necessity a bad thing? One weapon that comes to mind is the anti-tank missile. Without these weapons, tanks would be essentially invulnerable to light infantry. That has implications for anybody fighting a war of resistance against a better armed aggressor. One example would be the Ukrainians, but in general, light infantry are typical of resistance movements, because they are cheaper to equip. The anti-tank missile dramatically reduces the ability of strong, aggressive states to dominate their neighbors, and citizens. So far, drones have played a similar role. By massively lowering the financial and technical difficulties of providing close air support, they disproportionately benefit those combatants that don't have the money or resources to have a traditional air force.
- Const-me 5y agoThe quadcopters are not terribly efficient, they spending too much energy hovering. I think a fixed-wing drone of the similar form factor is the way to go, would fly many times longer. However, they will fly much faster and can’t stop. To be able to reliably evade obstacles and other drones, they gonna need much better sensors, also more on-board GFlops of compute power to handle data from these sensors. Fortunately, we still have amazing rate of technical progress so far in both cameras and mobile SoCs, driven by smartphones. For this reason, I think really amazing ones might arrive 5-10 years in the future.