15 ms·
Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer
- fsagx 2y agoThe anti tank guided missile designers of 50+ years ago would find this rather obvious.
- GartzenDeHaes 2y agoI think older TOW, AT-2, and other such missiles used wires rather than fiber optics. Fiber optics is thinner, which would give it a much longer range presumably.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y agoI was just about to say the same thing, TOW missiles are still in service.
- lupusreal 2y agoI think all the fiber/wire controlled TOWs are retired from US service though? The new ones are all wireless AFAIK.
- romwell 2y agoThe more relevant part is that Ukraine is using them right now, and that has been specifically mentioned in the article.
- rock_artist 2y agoFrom my understanding this technology is still actively used by Spike [1] based missiles and their counterfeit ones by Iran used by its allies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_(missile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_(missile)
- Muromec 2y agoThat's because US military doesn't optimize for cost and can have those things costing in the area of 250 per shot. Ukrainian military does optimize for cost and gets 10 of fly by wire Stugna's for this money.
- romwell 2y ago>The anti tank guided missile designers of 50+ years ago would find this rather obvious. TOW missiles are specifically mentioned in the article as an example of this technology being in active use for decades (and particularly, right now in Ukraine)
- Muromec 2y agoUkrainian Stugna-P is fly by wire and was actively used in 2022.
- morkalork 2y agoStugna is laser guided, no?
- H8crilA 2y agoYeah, a beam-rider, doesn't have a fiber optic cable like the TOW. There was some cool footage early on in the war where a skilled Ukrainian Stugna-P operator pointed the beam just off of an enemy helicopter (or maybe some armored vehicle, but I think it was a helicopter), then corrected to the target at the last moment. This gave as little warning as possible to the crew of the helicopter via their illumination sensors. Very skilful.
- AmVess 2y agoTOW missiles are a LOT faster than a drone and fired a LOT father away.
- tamimio 2y agoYeah, these are called tethered drones. They've been around for decades and have their own use cases, especially on moving vehicles or boats. There's nothing new about them.
- Cacti 2y agoThese have explosives and a ten mile fiber optic cable. Little different.
- tamimio 2y agoExplosives are just a payload (like any other payload you can attach to a drone), either independent from the whole system or activated through a simple relay. You can see ArduPilot is the ground station, where you can easily customize such switches. The distance is only about the wire/fiber; obviously, fiber is lighter, hence the longer distance for the drone to carry.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y agoTen miles is pretty impressive, but TOW missiles are from the 70s.
- mandevil 2y agoThe Ruhrstall X-4 [1] had five and a half kilometers of wire 80 years ago, along with a 20kg warhead and an acoustic proximity fuse. 1: Never deployed operationally Luftwaffe wunderwaffen, first tested in August 1944, wire-guided air-to-air missile.
- nikolay 2y agoThe tethered are differnet and long in use in America for mass surveillance in cities [0]. [0]: https://www.unmannedsas.com/ https://www.unmannedsas.com/
- obviousstate 2y ago[flagged]
- jwsteigerwalt 2y agoI found it interesting there was no mention of submarine torpedo control by wire in the article.
- scintill76 2y agoI’m amused picturing soldiers following the fiber back to the drone operator. But I suppose either their location is no real secret, it’s easy to defend and/or the other end has a radio transceiver far enough away from jamming and giving them a few more km of buffer.
- rasz 2y agoGood luck finding end of the strand after explosion :)
- CMCDragonkai 2y agoWhy not lasers?
- Arrath 2y agoLike using line of sight laser comms to send commands and return video? Exactly that, line of sight. The horizon strictly limits your operational range, and for fpv suicide drones there goes your terminal guidance (or the "buzzing around inside a maintenance warehouse to blow up vehicles inside") capabilities. Could be useful for high flying surveillance drones, but not much beyond that.
- jlmorton 2y agoFly the drones in pairs? Relay drone goes to a significantly higher altitude in the middle? * / \ / \
- _0ffh 2y agoYes, or just have a relay drone with radio comm relatively close, so jamming's not a problem and have that communicate via laser with the disposable drone. One problem might be smoke, though, which happens both naturally on a battlefield and is also often used for concealment.
- morkalork 2y agoThe problem with following the fiber back is they don't have just one explosive drone and they will happily target anyone meandering into the grey zone.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: Inside The 'Magic Radio' Protecting Russian Drones from Jamming (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735138
- walterbell 2y agoWhat's the cost of a 10 mile fiber optic cable, relative to the RF drone jammer it defeats, or the $5K drone it defends?
- rasz 2y agoHundreds of dollars aka insignificant.
- walterbell 2y agoThat's a good price. Web search found Corning SMF-28e+ single mode optical fiber [1], retail price ~$1500 USD [2] for 10 miles. [1] https://www.corning.com/optical-communications/worldwide/en/home/products/fiber/optical-fiber-products/smf-28e-.html https://www.corning.com/optical-communications/worldwide/en/... [2] https://www.fiberinthebox.com/p/21683/corning-smf-28e-100kpsi-9-125-250%CE%BCm-os2-single-mode-fiber-g-652-optical-fiber-product https://www.fiberinthebox.com/p/21683/corning-smf-28e-100kps...
- jiggawatts 2y agoMulti mode is cheaper and perfectly fine for these low data rates
- jandrese 2y agoMulti-mode would be heavier and bulkier. For the drone every gram saved on the spool is another gram you can add to the explosive. The article does talk about these drones having relatively small payloads due to the weight of the spool. I briefly thought about having the drones spool out a pair of thin copper wires instead and having very high voltage running through the wires so the drone didn't have to carry a battery, but realized this would be wildly impractical as the resistance of the wire would kill the voltage and they would constantly be touching each other in the wind or sagging down to the ground and shorting out.
- mey 2y agoPerun (unsurprisingly) did a video on the drone's evolution in Ukraine, including countermeasures and counter counter measures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJnuTtUFiWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJnuTtUFiWM Drones are highly variable.
- jiggawatts 2y agoI wonder if you could make a combo with power delivery and signal via a wire+fibre spool — eliminating the battery. Then have intermediate drones holding up the strand to extend the range…
- manvillej 2y agoeach extra drone is more power needed to keep the drones and wire in the air. More power requirements means bigger wires, bigger wires mean more resistance, which means more power In addition, every drone has dependency on all of the drones previously. Failure at any point in the chain will cause failure in the entire system. So in essence, there is a limit to how far you can chain drones together and they will be very vulnerable to catastrophic failure. You also have more and more drones to control and send signal to. could it be done? yes. viable/useful? doubtful
- etrautmann 2y agocool idea but that seems very hard. Resistance goes up with distance, and tiny wires (100 µm or so for fiber) would have high resistance and low current capacity).
- amelius 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38865518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38865518
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- anfractuosity 2y agoCould that be done with a high powered laser, rather than wire, I wonder.
- jrexilius 2y agoYes, SPE could get you ~1km. https://electricui.com/blog/spe-sensor-node https://electricui.com/blog/spe-sensor-node
- jharohit 2y agoprobably better done with lasercomms
- outworlder 2y agoWhat about tracking and constant line of sight requirements?
- 23B1 2y agoCould do a 'local' relay drone with LOS on the 'forward' drone?
- etrautmann 2y agothat requires good weather and precision alignment on a moving platform. line of sight is possible with a relay drone, but now you have to align multiple lines of sight precisely while moving, and still can't fly with any smoke, fog, etc. fiber optic seems like a pretty robust solution here.
- crygin 2y agoYou could even power it, too: https://powerlighttech.com/autonomous-vehicles/ https://powerlighttech.com/autonomous-vehicles/
- anfractuosity 2y agoWould an 'explosively pumped flux compression generator' disrupt electronics within a drone? Also do many drones use GPS / dead-reckoning and follow pre-guided paths, to avoid need for comms. Came across - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fgcxDRti5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fgcxDRti5s recently which uses an array of IMUs and filtering, to they claim get accuracy similar to a fibre optic gyro.
- jerf 2y agoIf someone says they're immune to RF jamming, I naturally interpret that from the perspective of blocking communication. I don't necessarily expect that they're claiming to be immune to EMP blasts straight-up destroying the electronics.
- idunnoman1222 2y ago[flagged]
- mschuster91 2y ago> You are envisioning a tech that does not exist Nuclear blasts can cause EMPs [1]. This is honestly the thing I am most scared about someone trying in a WW3 scenario - one high altitude EMP for Europe, one for North America, and everyone not in the military is back to the digital stone age. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
- krisoft 2y ago> This is honestly the thing I am most scared about someone trying in a WW3 scenario Interesting. The most scared I'm in that situation is suffering 3rd degree burns at the same time everyone else does in a few tens of kilometer radius. Or you know what would be even worse? Not suffering that injury personally, but trying to ease the last hours of friends and family who did. That feels like it would suck more than getting back to the digital stone age.
- iamleppert 2y agoForbes rediscovers the 1950's Park Flyer. Film at 11.
- zh3 2y agoKnowing a little bit about this, a 12km spool of 0.125mm plastic fibre costs about $1k [0]. Limits the range still (especially if the fibre is jacketed/supported in anyway). They'll be back to barrage balloons next [1]. [0] https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-detail.php?id=3630&sum=168 https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-detail.php?id=3630&sum=1... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon
- hnuser123456 2y ago.014 g/m or .014 kg/km or 0.14kg for 10km or 0.31 lbs
- samstave 2y agoWow. Imagine just having a tether like this [whatever altitude] above your property - if you had multiple of these fibers, one could use them as guy-wires - to hold a balloon with solar powered cam and redundant fiber connections... These should be placed over mountains - remote cabins, ski resorts. Whats the tensile strength? So if you do use them as a guy - and hit some heavy winds... Put high powered air-plane-warning LEDS... a cam, and a HAM-to-fiber transceiver... EDIT - Also, several strands of these as guys holding a solar cambloon in place would pose no substantial threat to Big Bird.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- barelyauser 2y agoBeam riding is also a thing. The missile is guided by a sensor in its butt, therefore making it harder to jam.
- pbmonster 2y agoThat requires line of sight with the target. Most drone usage right now is far beyond line of sight. You could get around that by having a relay drone at high altitude, but that complicates the system by a lot, and you'd have to somehow defend your relay.
- jandrese 2y agoBeyond the limitations mentioned in the article (shortish range, reduced payload capacity), these drones also leave behind a trail pointing directly at wherever they were launched from.
- xphilter 2y agoThat seems solvable with a payload of a transceiver that is dropped outside the range of the jammer. Then you only need a spool as long as the radius of the jammer + some margin.
- renerick 2y agoUnless you get some magically high quality camera on your own drones, the only realistic way to follow this trail is on foot. You can't just guide artillery or missiles to the other end of the wire, and if the Drone was launched over the frontline - there is little to do about it. And nothing stops the operator from pulling at least a part of the wire back, even if it's ripped in the middle - the trail is gone.
- jijijijij 2y agoThey could shine a very bright light into the fiber and see which tree lights up on the other end, at night :D I mean, mostly joking, but maybe an IR beam could actually be visible to a night vision equipped drone?
- zh3 2y agoIt's surprising how hard it is to find low-diameter fibre if it drops off the desk, never mind through undergrowth. Of course, if it was monomolecular wire [0] you'd just encircle the opposition and reel in the loop, cutting them in two (horizontally). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomolecular_wire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomolecular_wire
- chatmasta 2y agoWho says the base needs to be a ground station? You could have a hot air balloon above the drones.
- cryptonector 2y agoWhy put the spool on the drone? I'd think you'd put it at the base station, and maybe have a way to cut the fiber on the drone so you can pull all the fiber back to the base station. Ah, but maybe that makes it easy to find the base station, but unless the drone can be autonomous after some point and take the fiber with it far from the base station, I'm not sure the base station's location can really be protected. EDIT: Ah, the real reason the spool has to be on the drone must be that the drone can't pull the fiber through snags, and if the spool is on the drone then it doesn't have to.
- melevittfl 2y agoI’m guessing the strain on the spooled end is less and you want the end most likely to detach close to the ground where you might be able to reattach it, vs in the drone where it would fall to the ground and be unfixible.
- bearbin 2y agoThe whole concept is unfixable. Once the fibre comes out, it's not going to go back in. It's that deadly combination of fragile and cheap. Just unpack a new drone and off you go. Don't spend a week (and 10 casualties going into the grey zone to collect it) winding it back up only to find it's broken in the middle.
- LeifCarrotson 2y agoNo, it's a one-time use kamikaze device. The fiber intentionally, continuously, invisibly drifts to the ground. The drone contains explosives. You really do not want it to come back to you in one piece.
- giantrobot 2y agoCables drones would (and likely do) make better relays than as attack drones. A relay drone flies out to the horizon and relays the LoS signals to an attack drone flying over the horizon from the perspective of the base station. The relay then gets to spend far more of its power budget on the relay-drone segment and has a very low power relay-base segment. Relay drones also perform surveillance while they're on station. Better bandwidth to the base station from a "wired" connection means a higher fidelity feed or potentially additional cameras to cover a wider area.
- akira2501 2y ago> DARPA's Close Combat Lethal Recon drone was a fiber-optic guided loitering munition for urban combat Forbes just really loves pushing lethal "urban" technology. I personally find the habit to be disgusting. > “I am already asking Ukrainian specialists to test this control technology so that we do not end up behind the enemy,” It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to destroy urban areas and the civilian populations that live in them. Forbes, of course, loves this because in our current economic model there's a lot of money to be had in inventing new horrific ways to murder people. Well, that's my "1 of 4 free articles" this month, I guess.
- mullingitover 2y ago> It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just happily escalating the conflict Agree, it's unusual and satisfying to see the west backing a justified war of defense against a country that's a full-blown comic book villain.
- akira2501 2y ago> a country that's a full-blown comic book villain. Have you examined the logic of this position? You legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book villain?" And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send conscripted civilians to their deaths? So much so that it "satisfies" you? Wow.
- krisoft 2y ago> Have you examined the logic of this position? Yes. > You legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book villain? Not an entire country. The leadership of the country, yes. > And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send conscripted civilians to their deaths? I'm not sending anyone. If the people of Ukraine decides it is time to stop defending themselves I will accept their decision with a sad resignation. > So much so that it "satisfies" you? Yes. It satisfies me that we are on the good side of this conflict. Would satisfy me even more if the conflict were not happening. But spending my tax money to help people protect themselves is much better, much more satisfying than the usual status quo which is to spend my tax money to hurt innocents. Eagerly awaiting your further questions on the topic.
- rolph 2y agofiberoptic drone control and feedback surveillance during initial phase of engagement such ordinance, would provide telemetry and situational intelligence resources while transiting the first kilometers of range, thus the ordinance is munition and reconaisance device.
- BoredPositron 2y agoIs it only control or also power?
- darksaints 2y agoI'm familiar with a number of methods that are being used in Ukraine, and the ones that drone operators seem to be most keen on is autonomous targeting. Basically, using computer vision and other sensor networks to identify and subsequently target a threat (usually in a cordoned off zone). Unfortunately the cameras, sensors, and compute hardware is expensive enough that they're trying to preserve the drone by using droppable ordnance, which is a lot harder to hit accurately. And the prices essentially mean they only get used to take out jammers, with normal FPV drones being used otherwise. They do rely on drones being able to switch between autonomous modes upon detection of jamming attempts, which seems easy enough to do (though I know nothing about the techniques). My thought was if the detection of jamming attempts is easy enough, shouldn't it be just as easy to use RF direction finding and a fairly simple greedy seeker algorithm to find and destroy the jammer?
- edaemon 2y agoThere are systems that can target jammers, like an anti-radiation missile (ARM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile. Advanced systems like ARMs use complex sensors and algorithms to determine the location of the emitter before guiding themselves to its location. That allows them to hit an inactive radiation source and avoid terrain, but it requires sensors that are too expensive to use on quadcopter-type drones. As far as I understand you can't simply follow the emitter signal because the jammer can easily take countermeasures. For example, putting the jammer inside a building or vegetation would prevent any unpiloted drone from causing any harm. Even if the jammer was exposed, cycling it on and off every 30s would still effectively interfere with flight but prevent a signal seeker system from reliably finding the jammer. Plus, many drones don't have the range to reach a jammer.
- darksaints 2y agoI know I'm just some dude and people on the ground likely have tried all of these ideas, but I guess then I would take the approach that you can use that sort of expensive sensor array on autonomous forward observer drones, which detect and map out jammer locations which can then be targeted with basic artillery. Basic terrain avoidance and autonomous (non-RF dependent) flight algorithms can be implemented on simple $500 drones with IP cameras and rpi onboard computers (I've built some of my own). I would imagine that within an order of magnitude of $500, you could get an autonomous drone with enough payload for any type of sensor array you could want for detecting jammers. The big problem that Ukraine has faced has been jammers operating within FPV ranges, which are typically about half the range of a 155mm artillery shell, so leave the targeting to them.
- lnyng 2y agoWhat if deploy some high altitude balloons as base stations.
- tguvot 2y agobaloons, kites and relay drones. already done
- swamp40 2y agoI don't see fly-by-fiber getting very popular. The only goal is anti-jamming. But if the drone was fully autonomous, there would be no signals to jam. And the fully autonomous drones are coming fast. Meta's SAM 2 can follow pretty much any object anywhere, and people are beginning to get it running on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin. That's 75% of the work. The other 25% is autopilot and a way to disable it if it flies back over friendly territory. 6 months I'd say, for amateurs starting now. I'm sure some companies already have prototypes working.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 2y agoAnti-jamming is the intermediate goal. Fly by fiber allows the pilot to retain control of the drone while over the battlefield. With a completely autonomous drone in contested space (presumably with EW around), there's no way for a pilot to tell the drone "fly a little to the left to see what's behind that tree." Each drone has very specific use cases.
- JoachimS 2y agofly-by-fiber used to be very popular. And still is. The systems Russia is getting from North Korea is fly-by-fiber. Though I agree that autonomous drones is probably where we are heading. Ukraina has already shown swarms of autonomous drones working together. You even have different types of drones providing different function. A mama drone carrying smaller drones to the place of operation for example.
- pbmonster 2y agoThat just moves the arms race from anti-jamming to anti-ML targeting, doesn't it? Litter your trenches in inflatable mannequins (anti-CV), put all your soldiers in ghillie suits (anti-CV), have cheap fireworks ready to spread chaff (anti-radar) and flares (anti-IR).
- ImHereToVote 2y agoThe obvious solution is to target civilians with autonomous drones. Not much different to sanctions in terms of civilian casualties, but much more effective at stopping the enemy infrastructure. Since sanctions mostly kill children and the elderly.
- downWidOutaFite 2y agoI hate that robot warfare continues to advance as if scifi hasn't been warning of the dangers to humanity forever. Everybody is just full ahead as if it'll all workout fine. I consider it one of Obama's major failures, USA was a few years ahead in drone tech so Obama went trigger happy blowing up "terrorists" all over the middle east instead of putting together a UN coalition to come up with a weapons treaty to slow down the spread. The short-term war is always seen as the top priority instead of the long term consequences. I'm still amazed at the gift to humanity that was the coalition building and foresight of the post-ww2 years during which these kind of things were possible, and which we currently seem determined to squander.
- pbmonster 2y ago> instead of putting together a UN coalition to come up with a weapons treaty to slow down the spread I fully agree with the sentiment, but do you think that would have done anything? The barriers to entry are just very low, and the off-the-shelf components are heavily dual-use, which makes containment extremely difficult. I think even minor powers would have an extremely easy time doing the development anyway, either in secret (China) or by just eating the sanctions (Russia, Iran).
- ezekiel68 2y agoI mean... why wouldn't a non-radio control channel defeat RF jammers? Breaking: enlarging the drones sufficiently to include a cockpit with avionics for a human pilot also defeats any RF jammer.
- sklargh 2y agoLong distance fiber guidance is not a new concept. Most proximate example I can call to mind are the American TOW and Israeli Spike which have fiber guided variants/control options.
- LarsDu88 2y agoI'm surprised how few people are pointing out that you can simply trace the wire back to the control station. At roughly 1 km of actual range, that's not just mortar range, that's fucking grenade launcher range.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago.
- bobthepanda 2y agoYou could still disrupt the communication pretty easily and someone has to go and physically set up the box
- mndgs 2y agoBS. Though a RPG could travel 1km (not sure), I know for sure that an effective RPG range is 300-400 m, after which accuracy degrades substantially. And even if you try walking up the fiber cables (if you manage to spot them), you will become a target yourself much earlier than you manage to locate the origin of the fiber, i.e. the drone crew. So, that wouldn't work.
- LarsDu88 2y agoAn automatic grenade launcher firing 40 mm rounds can reach up to 2 km on a parabolic trajectory. It'd take a lot of grenades, but there are videos from the Ukraine war of Ukranian infantry landing hits at range on Russian positions using drone spotters.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ermir 2y agoI've been thinking a lot about this setup, and it seems it's a major advantage if you can pull it off: - The drone can send HD video with no interruptions through the fiber, shifting all the AI calculations to the backend, and you don't have to sacrifice your GPUs that you would otherwise add to the drone. - The fiber drone can act as a radio relay, so you can have many other radio drones connected to it, making jamming much harder and also you can use it as a relay for ground forces as well. - The fiber can potentially be replaced or augmented with copper, and you can then replace the battery with a transformer, and keep sending electricity from the base station. Such tethered drones already exist and can fly for hours, but maybe they have not been used in war before.
- psd1 2y agoPower transmission is going to be lossy. If you want kilometre range, you'll need heavy cable.
- ermir 2y agoA few things to consider: - You don't have to worry too much about efficiency from the ground, since resources are plentiful unlike the sky where every gram counts. For example it would be completely fine to have a 20% efficiency from the ground to the sky (if we don't take into account the heating of the wire), for example spend 2kw to get 400w in the drone. Not ideal, but acceptable to many. - Also, the efficiency can be greatly improved by using high voltage AC and a transformer on both ends. Very similar to how the power grid works, you can use thin cables to deliver a lot of power, I would not be surprised if 90% efficiency can be achieved. This field has been well researched, tethered drones can fly for hours, but the ranges that are useful in war (10+ km) are a novelty.