Tech's Most Controversial Startup Now Makes Drone-Killing Robots:
Jason Levin stood on a craggy hill on a Southern California ranch in late July and prepared to destroy a drone. First he grabbed the controls for an Up Air One, a remote control hobbyist model that retails for about $300, and steered it until it was hovering about 100 feet above the ground. Next he used a laptop to activate a system he'd spent the past several months building.
A second drone roughly the size of the Up Air quadcopter spun into action, buzzing like a mechanical wasp as it ascended to about 20 feet below its target. As it hovered, a crowd of Levin's colleagues gathered around. A prompt appeared on-screen asking for permission to attack. Levin tapped a button, and the second drone, dubbed the Interceptor, shot upward, striking the Up Air One at 100 mph. The two aircraft somersaulted skyward briefly, then they plummeted back to earth and landed with two satisfying thuds. Levin grinned and explained that he hadn't been controlling the Interceptor after telling it to attack—it finds targets and steers toward them on its own. If the first collision doesn't take its quarry down, the drone can circle back and strike a second and third time, all by itself. "It's a good feeling as an engineer," he said. "You've put in the work, and it knows what to do. It's like sending your kid off to college."
[...] He [Palmer Luckey], Levin, and a handful of colleagues came up with the idea of the Interceptor while hanging around the office one weekend earlier this year. The idea was to equip small drones with computer vision software that would scan a slice of airspace that needed protecting, then automatically ram any objects deemed hostile. They built a rough prototype that could knock down its target some of the time, then shot a smartphone video of a successful attempt and passed it to their contacts at the Pentagon.
[...] The prospect of a 2-year-old startup building and distributing a new class of potentially lethal weapons will undoubtedly raise ethical questions, especially amid a larger backlash against overreach by tech companies. The Interceptor in its current form doesn't target humans and requires explicit permission from a human operator before each attack, but it's conceivable that those controls could be changed in the future. "You've already developed this technology, opened the so-called Pandora's box," argues Marta Kosmyna of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a group opposed to autonomous weaponry. Technologies such as the Interceptor are "very rarely used as intended," she says.
Bloomberg posted a 5m41s YouTube video with background information on Anduril (the company selling the attack drone), Palmer Luckey (of Oculus Rift fame) as well as a couple short demos of attack drones in action.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday October 10 2019, @10:46PM
Hunting with drones, the modern day falconry. You can bring in a mixed bag, other drones, birds, weather balloons, etc. Design the attack drone so that it compacts into a ball (and/or maybe fires out a net) just before impact so the attack drone stands a better chance of being reusable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @10:49PM (1 child)
And come around for multiple passes until sucessful?
What could possibly go wrong?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @01:15AM
Just wait until one of these attacks another similar kamakaze...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @11:14PM (1 child)
What next, automated suicide bombing drones?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @11:18AM
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday October 10 2019, @11:31PM (3 children)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MBBC-xL_MTg [youtube.com]
Drones with guns.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 11 2019, @01:11AM (2 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sVElxRKQ0E [youtube.com] - with a machine gun and self-destruct
Or autonomous killer microdrones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK6IGG5zRU8 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday October 11 2019, @02:05AM
Holy shit! Wow. Charlene is scary.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Friday October 11 2019, @03:15AM
For just a little bit, I thought the autonomous killer microdrones were true. I was just looking over SBCs to turn into a router, and found a large amount of options with neural processors in AI kits. So it didn't seem completely unreasonable.
Not going to lie. A may have peed a little.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 10 2019, @11:55PM
I know there's at least one AC here who would love to work for this company.
Also, there better be VR controllers for killer drones if Luckey is there.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday October 11 2019, @12:12AM (4 children)
0-100mph, in 20 feet? By a prop-driven craft? Vertically? Fake engineering!!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @01:37AM
Maybe they are discussing the prop tip speed?
If I did it right, https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/physics/displacement_v_a_t.php [calculatorsoup.com] suggests:
2163 ft/sec^2 or 67g Not impossible, but very high acceleration, requires thrust 67 (or 68?) times the weight of the drone.
A former co-worker was a rocket scientist who worked on an anti-missile-missile that went up and turned to chase the target, it turned at 100g.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday October 11 2019, @02:49AM (1 child)
Scale speed?
Assuming a "full sized" vehicle would be 8 to 10 times larger, this drone would only be doing around 14mph [liveabout.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11 2019, @08:57AM
Ideas dreamed up while being infused with the blood of the younglings and watching your Palantir? Yep, bad science, evil technology, and Peter Thiel at the heart of it all. Mostly fantasy. Lucky Palm? Who has a date tonight! (Who makes up these names? Laid off Bond writers from the former British Empire?)
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday October 11 2019, @07:24PM
Liquid-based Jatos for the kill-shot? More likely. (Although the idea that it can come back and take another shot augurs against that, unless it has multiple bottles or a full-out fuel control system for that purpose)
This sig for rent.