Drone swarm technology - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 10, 2018, 11:57:00 pm
content: Drones come in many shapes and configurations - including multi-rotor and fixed wing. Having one can provide a multitude of services, from collecting intelligence to delivering ... well, you know.But what if you have hundreds?The recent Olympic opening ceremony showed two examples of providing a light show in the sky. The first was an animated snowboarder and the second, the Olympic rings.What I also found ominous, was the scene showing them approaching the target zone. It looked like something out of a sci-fi alien invasion. Also, the transition between the two images had an air of malevolence ... it was reminiscent of those adversaries that would reconfigure themselves to address a new threat.They also reminded me of the school of fish in "Finding Nemo".Military across the globe have been playing with this idea for quite some time. Here is a video released more than a year ago:... and there's more if you care to look.SO - just to get things started - my questions are: ... In what applications can you see drone swarms being used? What are the problems and benefits? What do we know about the technology and in what directions do you think it will go?

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 12:08:15 am
content: It has never been obvious to me that swarm technology would have much, if any, military application. Drone capability is related to cost. A drone that can go fast and far is going to be expensive, luxury car level or so. The cost of a swarm of these is hard to rationalize against the added capability. Short range, slow drones like current hexacopters make the swarm affordable, though the Olympic swarm was probably a significant fraction of a million dollars. It is hard to imagine what could be accomplished by the swarm that couldn't be done as well or better by the same investment in more conventional arms.

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 12:32:21 am
content: I would imagine things where you need to cover insane amounts of land in small areas, e.g. someone is missing in the bush, combine this with something like facebooks creepy pose estimation AI, and its not a far shoot to imagine you would need to hide pretty well,Not to mention these are fixed wing drones, a number of designs can easily have flight times approaching 40 minutes, you can cover a stupid amount of ground in 20 minutes and still make it back to a landing site,Where i could see the actual technology entering the hobby scene would be collision avoidance, with both other drones and larger aircraft, If your hobby drone could tell when an aircraft of helicopter was getting close enough to be concerned, and get the hell out of the way, I think that could resolve most of the current stigmas most pilots have towards the hobby,As for a large grouping of aircraft being able to fly in close formation without collisions (In that video there still seemed to be a number of aircraft crashing), aside from military purposes would likely be things like land surveying, where if the area of the land is truly massive, being able to release 20 drones instead of spending a day of flipping batteries may be an upside, however the price of survey grade gps units would still push this to a very small number of them,Then there are things like stock counting, again farms can be massive in area, far more than any 1 could reach in a single pass, so being able to release a number without them crashing into each other, being able to self land in fomation, etc, would be a benefit,

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 01:12:45 am
content: A military example from a Fox News article:http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/01/11/how-deadly-drone-swarms-will-help-us-troops-on-frontline.htmlWhat sort of missions will they undertake?Here’s an example of the sorts of tactics the swarms could learn and use.Say you have a bomb maker responsible for killing a busload of children, our military will release 50 robots – a mix of ground robots and flying drones…Their objective? They must isolate the target within a 2 square city blocks within 15 to 30 minutes max.To achieve this mission, the robots will need to be able to do the sorts of things human teams would do. The swarm will work together to conduct reconnaissance. They will need to identify ingress and egress points – ways the bomb maker could escape.To achieve this goal, the flying drones could fly out and find the potential escape routes and communicate the data to ground robots who can move into position to block and prevent escape.The swarm will need to establish a perimeter around an area of operation. This is important for preventing civilian casualties in case the bomb maker is wearing explosives.This points out one aspect of swarming ... not every member of the swarm needs to be flying.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 01:23:51 am
content: Another idea could be for demolition.Say the military wanted a precision demolition where an air strike was out of the question, but charges had to be placed in difficult locations - and had to be done very quickly.Place your charges on the drones and program the target. The swarm goes out, finds the target, locates the placement points and the right number of drones attach themselves to those points. When all in place, a communal suicide is triggered.The whole mission could be executed in minutes, without any risk to personnel that might have had to try doing it "the old way".

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 01:46:36 am
content: What you describe is effectively a swarm of small cruise missiles, the technology has been around for a long time, however it usually makes sense to use one larger device rather than a swarm of smaller ones. I think a multirotor is far too slow to have many military applications, it might work the first time but after that it won't take long for automated anti-aircraft guns to take them out before they can get close enough to do any damage. Smart bombs and cruise missiles travel at speeds orders of magnitude faster.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 02:10:45 am
content: Quote from: james_s on February 11, 2018, 01:46:36 amNot quite. What I described was a piecemeal approach and unified detonation. Very hard with a lot of cruise missiles.See how much collateral damage you would get with a smart bomb or cruise missile if you wanted to take out a target (for argument's sake) that sits between a school and a hospital.I'm not saying that smart bombs or cruise missiles don't have their place - nor that drones, whether fixed wing or multirotor, are the answer to every situation.However, I do feel that it is closed minded to dismiss them.

author: JustMeHere
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 02:39:14 am
content: This has been around for a long time now:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 02:45:24 am
content: Nope. Not even close to the capabilities of drones. It's still like killing a flea with a sledge hammer.These responses are based on traditional thinking - and that's the whole purpose of this thread ... to expand that thinking into new territory, new ideas and new possibilities that weren't even thought about in the past.

author: JustMeHere
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 03:11:30 am
content: The Hellfire has a 8KM and flies 1600 KMH. It is all weather capable. It won't blow away in a stiff breeze. With an EFP warhead can knock the engine out of your car without destroying the rest.You will never hear it coming. You are going to need very expensive equipment to defeat it.All you really need to defeat a drone is a net no tougher than a window screen, or even an eagle

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 03:30:28 am
content: The example of taking a bunch of small explosives and placing them is a classic of the sales pitch for drone swarms. But the key advantage is the ability to slowly move into a precise position. Which can be done with a single large drone as well as with dozens of small ones. And has the weakness of any slow placement approach - the defense has lots of time (hundreds or thousands or maybe tens of thousands of milliseconds) to react. Which a smart enemy can exploit very well with Arduino level technology. The swarm does give the defense more targets to deal with, but this is a two edged sword. The swarm must have a surplus of explosives so that they will still be effective after losses to the defense. Which will then be overkill if the defense is ineffective or absent. Which means that collateral damage will be higher than advertised.A lot of the drone thinking smells like the "Effects Based" warfare fad that went around in the late eighties and nineties. A group of bright people concluded that costs and collateral damage could be minimized by calculating exactly the amount of bomb damage that was required to cause an enemy to give up. Unfortunately in real world applications of this approach the enemy neglected to read the manuals saying when to give up, and in fact did not give up. Just got very mad and went after the people who had just expended their precisely calculated munitions load.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 03:57:04 am
content: Quote from: JustMeHere on February 11, 2018, 03:11:30 amAdrone ... ?We are not talking aboutadrone, we are talking about hundreds or thousands .... or even more. The defence logistics change dramatically.QuoteYou still have to have the net(s) or eagle(s) available and deployable.

author: Brumby
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 11, 2018, 04:00:14 am
content: It seems we are getting stuck on the military arena, so, how about this:What non "offensive weapon" uses of a drone swarm can we imagine...?

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2019, 03:29:04 pm
content: Quote from: Brumby on February 10, 2018, 11:57:00 pmKilling people of course , what else would CIA/MI6-5 want to do with them? Why bother send Hellfire missile at Maduro Trump etc when a fly size drone can deliver Ebola when he's at sleep and quietly disappear! Psychopaths would luve this tech. The smaller the creepier! Here is Russias flying Kalashnikov.

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2019, 03:58:58 pm
content: Quote from: MT on March 29, 2019, 03:29:04 pmGathering intelligence, i.e. spying. They don't need "drones" to kill people, just put a few drops of neurotoxin on your door handle, in your coffee, arrange a drug overdose, etc. Drones would be too obvious. Radio controlled model aircraft have been around for ages, it's nothing new.

author: amv
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 29, 2019, 08:23:09 pm
content: This little sci fi short film gives a grim look at what the future for drones/swarm drones could be.The frightening things is, that the small drones in the video actually already exist. Take a look at CX-10c at about 20$ at amazon. (I own and fly one )So give it a few years with software development, better batteries and a litle bigger drone as an repeater station, and hey skynet is your new unclehttps://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 30, 2019, 02:29:31 am
content: Quote from: apis on March 29, 2019, 03:58:58 pmWhat im talking about, "fly sized drone" who delivers it to the handle, coffee maker etc, noone would suspect a common fly filmed by the surveillance CCTV above the door/kitchen.