13 ms·

1. Drones do not perform anywhere near as well as a fighter jet. 2. There aren't even any autonomous UAVs right now, why do you think you will be able to make

1. Drones do not perform anywhere near as well as a fighter jet. 2. There aren't even any autonomous UAVs right now, why do you think you will be able to make one that can also autonomously evade a missile?

ericd 12y ago
1. That's not a characteristic inherent to drones, that's just what we've done to date. And there are remote controlled fighter jets that the military uses for practice. 2. Because it seems well within our capabilities to do some basic missile evasion AI, that's just a small subset of the challenge of making a fully autonomous UAV. You need to identify the missile and its trajectory, identify its flight and kill characteristics, and then identify the various actions you could take and evaluate their likelihood of successfully evading the missile. Then you carry that flight plan out. Rinse and repeat until you're no longer in danger.
- branchan 12y ago
  So you are saying: 1. We should make a drone have the same flight performance capabilities as a fighter jet, which will make it cost more money. 2. We should spend even more money to create an AI system with the exact same capabilities as a trained fighter pilot. Probably not an easy feat.
  - ericd 12y ago
    I'm not recommending that they do it one way or another - there're a lot of new possibilities that should be explored, which means that more of the same might not be the way to go. All I was saying that it's silly to say categorically that "drones are slow", because they certainly don't have to be - if anything, they have the potential to be even faster and more maneuverable than manned fighter jets, because you can get rid of a lot of the cruft and restrictions related to keeping a pilot alive and letting them pilot effectively. No more canopy, no more cockpit shielding, no more visible instrumentation and layout requirements, no more ejection seat, no more oxygen supply, no more human survivable g-limits, etc. I'm also not advocating for a completely autonomous drone, just saying that automatically flying a plane to evade a missile doesn't seem terribly difficult, as far as AI problems go, and the amounts of money thrown at these sorts of things are absurdly large.
- lilsunnybee 12y ago
  Think you might be making the same mistake described here: http://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/
  - ericd 12y ago
    Heh probably at least a little. I've got a decent grounding in AI and some in computer vision, and those portions at least seem doable, I've worked on some basic guidance algorithms before, and I know people who are having some success making generalized autopilot systems for drones for spatial waypoint following and flight controls, so that portion seems achievable as well. Once you can reach that level of abstraction, it starts looking like something a minimax algo with sufficient look-ahead depth could deal with, at least with a very rough level of precision. But yeah, devil and details.

ericd 12y ago

1. That's not a characteristic inherent to drones, that's just what we've done to date. And there are remote controlled fighter jets that the military uses for practice. 2. Because it seems well within our capabilities to do some basic missile evasion AI, that's just a small subset of the challenge of making a fully autonomous UAV. You need to identify the missile and its trajectory, identify its flight and kill characteristics, and then identify the various actions you could take and evaluate their likelihood of successfully evading the missile. Then you carry that flight plan out. Rinse and repeat until you're no longer in danger.

branchan 12y ago
So you are saying: 1. We should make a drone have the same flight performance capabilities as a fighter jet, which will make it cost more money. 2. We should spend even more money to create an AI system with the exact same capabilities as a trained fighter pilot. Probably not an easy feat.
- ericd 12y ago
  I'm not recommending that they do it one way or another - there're a lot of new possibilities that should be explored, which means that more of the same might not be the way to go. All I was saying that it's silly to say categorically that "drones are slow", because they certainly don't have to be - if anything, they have the potential to be even faster and more maneuverable than manned fighter jets, because you can get rid of a lot of the cruft and restrictions related to keeping a pilot alive and letting them pilot effectively. No more canopy, no more cockpit shielding, no more visible instrumentation and layout requirements, no more ejection seat, no more oxygen supply, no more human survivable g-limits, etc. I'm also not advocating for a completely autonomous drone, just saying that automatically flying a plane to evade a missile doesn't seem terribly difficult, as far as AI problems go, and the amounts of money thrown at these sorts of things are absurdly large.
lilsunnybee 12y ago
Think you might be making the same mistake described here: http://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/
- ericd 12y ago
  Heh probably at least a little. I've got a decent grounding in AI and some in computer vision, and those portions at least seem doable, I've worked on some basic guidance algorithms before, and I know people who are having some success making generalized autopilot systems for drones for spatial waypoint following and flight controls, so that portion seems achievable as well. Once you can reach that level of abstraction, it starts looking like something a minimax algo with sufficient look-ahead depth could deal with, at least with a very rough level of precision. But yeah, devil and details.