Sad drone on ground
January 16, 2015 7:53 PM   Subscribe

 
That name...

I think I'll stick to barrage balloons, thank you very much.
posted by Behemoth at 8:00 PM on January 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


"PULL"
posted by clavdivs at 8:02 PM on January 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


Helluva planet we've found ourselves on, ain't it?
posted by islander at 8:06 PM on January 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


This will be the weapon of choice between warring neighbors once Amazon drone delivery starts going.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:16 PM on January 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Let me be the 37,214th to say... "What could possibly go wrong?"
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:45 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think this would be pretty easy counter with basic evasive manuevers.
posted by humanfont at 8:50 PM on January 16, 2015


It's interceptor drones all the way down...
posted by Windopaene at 8:55 PM on January 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Begun this drone war has...
posted by troll on a pony at 8:59 PM on January 16, 2015 [11 favorites]


a friend of mine, who i think i rightfully describe as somewhere between a mad scientist and an asshole invented something with a magnetron tube from a BIG(ie commercial, 2kw or something) microwave and a bunch of reflectors and various other bits and bobs that's basically the ghostbusters gun. No idea what the range is, but it'll stall a car if you aim it close enough to the ECU.

It's not strong enough to do much from a very big distance, but i have to wonder how much it would take to disrupt something like this right as it launches? I have yet to see a quadcopter in which the controller board is actually _shielded_ in any way because weight. Mine has glitched out from very, very tiny amounts of RFI that didn't disrupt any other devices near me, even when just hovering in place(and i have a nice spread spectrum digital TX/RX) Launching another actual drone seems like silly overkill and it's easy to disrupt drones. The future is something the size of a tazer, or maybe a smartphone that's basically just ECM. Build it to look like an old FM walkman radio. Pull it out, pull the antenna out, either jam drone in place or crash it.

On autonomous ones like this, find a way to just fuck with the controller board.

If i didn't actually care about my quadcopter at all, i'd take it out and fly it up 30 feet or so and aim that magnetron gun at it. I'd be fucking SHOCKED if it didn't just crash.

I'm also looking forward to the future of "phreaking" boxes for these sorts of things. On mine, with a mid-quality RX(spektrum stuff) it's ALWAYS in pairing mode for the first second or two it's on. My thoughts here are create enough interference/strong enough RFI noise to make the controller reset(i've seen this happen just from it drifting too close to a big transformer actually, i believe), hijack it, and then send it a signal to just fly as high as it can, invert, and crash as hard as possible.

Hell, even just waiting til they give an input to gain altitude or something then spraying out a bunch of garbage signal so it just semi-rapidly flies away in to nowhereland should be a valid strategy.

But mostly, a whole other flying vehicle seems more like an engineerwank project from someone who had dreams of like, dogfighting drones than the smoothest or cheapest solution. If you don't give a shit about FCC regulations(and presumably, the people operating these drones against you would be breaking the law anyways) there's got to be some much simpler, and stealthier solutions out there.

Make it look like it *Mysteriously* failed on its own, not like you obviously shot it down. The first has plausible deniability, the second is a visible act of aggression. It's like punching the robot paparazzi in the face.

I will note that i'm not an electrical engineer or anything. But i've fucked around with the tx/rx stuff for my quadcopter a lot, and gone through a couple. I've also played with my friends stupid inventions a lot. Everything i suggested seems plausible to me at least.
posted by emptythought at 8:59 PM on January 16, 2015 [17 favorites]


My drone gonna kick your drone's ASS.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:48 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


Bah, forget about those anti-drone drones that drop string on other drones! Wait'll you see my surface-to-air ballistic silly string cannon, it's much more fun.
posted by XMLicious at 10:20 PM on January 16, 2015 [5 favorites]


Everything i suggested seems plausible to me at least.

It is and it isn't. The problem you run into is the r2 problem. As you get better antennas with more gain, you can make r2 into ~r, but you have to aim more carefully the more directionality(i.e. gain) you add.

And you need to push a lot of power to do anything substantial at a range anyway. Plus basic shielding isn't that hard - some tinfoil will do in the trivial case. Several layers of tinfoil with a good dielectric between them are even better.

And this leaves aside the whole FCC part 15 issues with developing an ECM designed to disrupt things.

Personally ? Time to bust out my wrist rocket. Poor thing has been languishing in my closet since around the time I discovered girls.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:22 PM on January 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


One word: shotgun. You're welcome.
posted by Splunge at 10:57 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


Bah, forget about those anti-drone drones that drop string on other drones! Wait'll you see my surface-to-air ballistic silly string cannon, it's much more fun.

I never knew I needed anti-aircraft silly string guns until now
posted by NoraReed at 12:08 AM on January 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Wiktionary says that rapere is Latin for to snatch, grab, carry off, or abduct, and that the English words raptor and rape are descended from it. If there are any Sabines reading, you better watch out for these drones.
posted by foobaz at 12:59 AM on January 17, 2015


Silly string? Maybe not enough range...
posted by From Bklyn at 1:34 AM on January 17, 2015


I think this would be pretty easy counter with basic evasive manuevers.

Not sure if you RTFA, but their case for why this is not so seems quite plausible to me.
posted by lastobelus at 2:22 AM on January 17, 2015


I have one of these. Looks like this
posted by iotic at 3:26 AM on January 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Plus basic shielding isn't that hard - some tinfoil will do in the trivial case.

Hahaha. Modern drone radios and high power commercial microwaves both transmit in the same 2.4 GHz band. Shielding won't save your drones.
posted by ryanrs at 3:51 AM on January 17, 2015


Interesting that rape and rapture are descended from the same source.

Also rapid and ravish
posted by iotic at 3:53 AM on January 17, 2015


I'm just going to take a moment to enjoy this before listing all the reasons it can't work.

But if it does, I'm getting two.
posted by welovelife at 4:25 AM on January 17, 2015


This is quite easy to counter, of course. But it's clearly possible to build a drone with no payload, modest "armor", and reasonable agility to hunt and smack into most hobby-sized quadrotors. This is close enough to my day job that I might just look into it.

Related: some idiot was hovering a quadrotor over the soccer team I (assistant) coach last season. On a public school field. After about 15 minutes of this, I started to hunt it back to where it appeared to be operated from... I think the operator saw this and bugged off. I still don't know quite what I was going to say if I found the operator. Suggestions welcome, though. Love this brave new world.
posted by Ella Fynoe at 4:47 AM on January 17, 2015


Seriously though, how hard can it be to send up and little cloud of silly string/streamers to tangle the rotors? I mean, if you really want to neutralize one - without resorting to shotguns or microwave Gaus-guns?
I guess I'm questioning the hardiness of the rotors...
posted by From Bklyn at 5:16 AM on January 17, 2015


It will now become standard practice to keep a small child positioned under one's drone at all times. Ideally, the child catches the drone, saving it from destruction. Alternatively, the child is injured or killed by the falling drone, causing media outrage and ending the reign of drone-interceptors.
posted by dmd at 6:58 AM on January 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's all a question of scaling. We're talking LOTS of silly string.
posted by arcticseal at 6:59 AM on January 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


> That name…

I think the word he wanted is "Rapier," but I could be wrong.

> One word: shotgun. You're welcome.

One word: prison. You're welcome.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:46 AM on January 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


SkyJack
posted by liliillliil at 8:12 AM on January 17, 2015


Seriously though, how hard can it be to send up and little cloud of silly string/streamers to tangle the rotors? I mean, if you really want to neutralize one - without resorting to shotguns or microwave Gaus-guns?

That's not the point. This is an air-to-air weapon. If it has target tracking ability, that's all you need. Forget silly string, send it up with a grenade and put it in the path of an airliner. It will have more air time than an anti-aircraft artillery shell and a better likelihood of getting within the kill radius. There have already been numerous reports of airliners sighting drones in their flightpath near airports. These are probably the same sort of idiots that shine lasers at airliners during landing. Some people just want to see the world burn.

I have been warning people for years about the militarization of drones, it takes cruise missile technology down to a smaller, personal scale. The biggest technological leap in cruise missiles was GPS guidance, that's why the US built the GPS network in the first place. Now you can buy hobby drone kits with Raspberry Pi guidance systems superior to most cruise missiles.

I assure you that the US Military is already developing these smaller scale smart weapons. They already have sensor grids that deploy by artillery, spreading small sensors like a cluster bomb. But hey, why not just attach them to cluster bombs? They have done that too. They are called area denial weapons, the new high tech version of a minefield. You deploy a field full of sensors, and wait for the target to walk into the field, and when he gets close to a bomb, detonate. Or wait for a squad to get into the area, and let them all rip at once, killing everything. But no, they didn't even stop there. I saw reports of tests of remote bomblets with motors and little legs to move into better positions and spread out across a battlefield.

And that's where this drone tech comes in. The rapid development of self-driving cars is being quickly adapted to drones flying in 3D space. Now this guy proposes target tracking systems. I am sure this will be a great success. The drones will be able to autonomously sense a target and fly to it. This can easily be weaponized as area denial weaponry. Send a dozen drones into an area, spread them out, or concentrate them near roads or other target rich environments. When the drone sensors detect a vehicle or person coming into range, it can just pop up and fly to the target, and set off a little block of explosives. You could fly hundreds of sensor equipped drones into an urban battlefield, they can perch on rooftops and provide overwatch for the entire area. Efficient and deadly, and more than likely impossible to defend against.

So did these Rapere developers consider the implications of what they are creating?
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:15 AM on January 17, 2015


> One word: shotgun. You're welcome.

One word: prison. You're welcome.

Yep, that what you need one of them there drone hunting licenses for. (Later voted down, sadly.)

I have been warning people for years about the militarization of drones

Not to knock your Cassandra-like visionary prescience, I myself like to stare vaguely into the distance and issue ominous warnings, but didn't drones start off as military hardware?
posted by XMLicious at 11:41 AM on January 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


didn't drones start off as military hardware?

You have a point, but I'm not talking about fixed wing UAVs. I suppose I should use a more accurate description, like quadrotor aircraft. I looked around and found early military prototypes like the VZ-8 and the X-19. There are orders of magnitude between these large scale military aircraft and personal quadrotors that can cost a few hundred bucks. I've seen experiments in military applications like small recon drones but not much else at this scale. There is very little money to be made building $500 drones compared to $17,000,000 MQ-9 Reaper UAVs.

And besides, there are simpler systems to take down quadrotors, like my recent FPP, A New Golden Age of Falconry.
posted by charlie don't surf at 1:04 PM on January 17, 2015


Hahaha. Modern drone radios and high power commercial microwaves both transmit in the same 2.4 GHz band. Shielding won't save your drones.

Yea. I'm pretty sure him testing the thing partially killed my laptops wifi card from outside the house. I don't know how much effort you'd even have to put in to aiming all that well.
posted by emptythought at 1:06 PM on January 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


You can't fight drones with other drones or falcons - you want something much cheaper than the drones.

Weighted nets sound like the way to go - somewhere between 2 and 3 meters in diameter. You could make them out of fishing line, tie weights to the edge, then have something shoot them with a spin so they spread out.

If you used something mechanical like a large rubberband slingshot to shoot it, it would be noiseless and probably close to invisible to the bouncy, moderate-fidelity cameras that you find on drones, particularly at night - fishing line is hard to see anyway, and you could use glass weights if you wanted to get fancy.

Once you had some shooters, the big effort would be building the "shot", but I'll bet if you had a dozen friends, enough supplies and you set up an ad-hoc assembly line, you could knock out a few hundred of them in a day once you got it down, for pennies per each.

You heard it here first.

(I wouldn't recommend doing this for fun - the waste and danger from all that fishing line strung around the environment is far too great.)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 1:18 PM on January 17, 2015


You have a point, but I'm not talking about fixed wing UAVs. I suppose I should use a more accurate description, like quadrotor aircraft. I looked around and found early military prototypes like the VZ-8 and the X-19. There are orders of magnitude between these large scale military aircraft and personal quadrotors that can cost a few hundred bucks. I've seen experiments in military applications like small recon drones but not much else at this scale.

Another place to look for early drone work is the Internation Aerial Robotics Competition from the early 90s. Sponsored/founded/something by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems. Here's what it looked like to engineering students in 1995.

It took me a long time to realize I don't want anything at all to do with drones. The technical side of doing this stuff is fascinating. Unfortunately, the vast majority of real world applications are obnoxious, or much worse.
posted by Chuckles at 1:45 PM on January 17, 2015


I've seen experiments in military applications like small recon drones but not much else at this scale. There is very little money to be made building $500 drones compared to $17,000,000 MQ-9 Reaper UAVs.

The term you're looking for is MAV, micro aerial vehicle. No need to look back at the 1950s and 1960s, here's a video from 2007 of a drone used by the U.S. military in Iraq that was far from experimental, a 3rd or 4th generation production model from Honeywell to my civilian understanding.
posted by XMLicious at 1:59 PM on January 17, 2015


here's a video from 2007

Interesting. Looks like a ducted fan with fins to divert the air flow. Reminds me that the Canadair Sentinel (1977) probably deserves note.

I'm not sure what the Classification categories should be. Rotary wing vs. fixed wing. Variable blade pitch vs. fins vs. brute force changing the speed of rotation. Or just classify by size. The term MAV doesn't seem to have stuck to any particular size yet, but I guess it might. Are you a lumper or a splitter...
posted by Chuckles at 2:20 PM on January 17, 2015


Ah, I should have checked the Federation of American Scientists site, they always have the data on weapon systems. It appears the term I am looking for is TUAV, Tactical UAV.

Here is a particularly interesting report, Pilotless Drones: Background and Considerations for Congress Regarding Unmanned Aircraft Operations in the National Airspace System. Perhaps the Rapere is on to something, it looks like the Military considers civilian UAVs a threat to their airspace.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:50 PM on January 17, 2015


Following some of the links from that FAS page, "TUAV" would appear to also include some of the aircraft-sized fixed-wing UAVs you said you weren't talking about.

In any case, whatever you want to call them, militarization of small breadbox-sized hovering drones of the same order of magnitude of size as today's hovering hobbyist drones is something that happens a decade and more in the past rather than in the future. (Or in addition to in the future, I was originally trying to say)
posted by XMLicious at 3:24 PM on January 17, 2015


Right, but civilian ownership of military-capable UAVs is pretty new. And I'll show you what scares me, here's a document from FAS, DoD Inventory of and Funding for Unmanned Aerial Systems, FY02-FY17. The image on page 6 shows all types of military UAVs except one, a classified Navy system. Then the next two pages have illustrations of unmanned land and sea weapon systems.

That document also goes into some detail about area denial weapons, which they are calling A2/AD, anti-access/area denial.
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:35 PM on January 17, 2015


Yeah, it's all still scary and disturbing. Even if the "area denial" stuff with drones is indeed new and isn't something they've been doing from the beginning, though, it doesn't seem particularly more disturbing than the robot sentries (e.g., armed with a machine gun and grenade launcher) that were, again, already in production and use a decade and more ago that also function to kill anyone coming within a certain region.

My favorite scary drone anecdote is the EATR proposal from the aughts (previously) which as Wikipedia describes was "a robotic vehicle that could forage for plant biomass to fuel itself, theoretically operating indefinitely" for which the designer posted a press release to emphatically say that it would not consume human flesh, even though chicken fat was listed as a potential fuel source.

At least there was that UN conference on banning autonomous weapon systems last year, not that a ban on flipping a certain switch to turn on a feature is really all that reassuring.
posted by XMLicious at 4:24 PM on January 17, 2015


…you want something much cheaper than the drones…

The "natural" cost of drones is around $25 plus about $25 per kg of lifting force. That's now. The ones on the market that cost hundreds to a thousand or two are only incrementally more capable and a little bit bigger than the mass produced ones that are available NOW for < $50. There's nothing about them that is inherently costly except economies of scale haven't driven down the price on the latest generation yet.

The sort of processing power required for the kind of visual processing described in the OP is still somewhat more expensive than the processors that enable the toys to have stable avionics. But it too will fit in commodity priced SOCs in a couple years.

We really are a handful of processor iterations and one moderate-to-significant battery breakthrough from a world where drones change everything. It makes the future quite opaque.

Learning to fly them first person takes quite a lot of practice, but once you learn you can fly a drone from anywhere covered by cellular wireless, which is most of the developed world (the second or so of lag does make it quite difficult, but it is no harder than getting good at an FPS). You could leave one somewhere that won't get wet, and fire it up in a month or a year from anywhere in the world. This isn't something imaginary, but something that any moderately competent hobbyist can do now with off the shelf pieces.
posted by lastobelus at 10:26 PM on January 17, 2015


cjorgensen: "> That name…

I think the word he wanted is "Rapier," but I could be wrong.

> One word: shotgun. You're welcome.

One word: prison. You're welcome.
"

One word: Joking. Pttttbbbbb.
posted by Splunge at 9:04 AM on January 18, 2015


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