Drones built to look like birds evaded detection at Air Force tech exercise

Posted by bushwart 1 day ago

Comments

2052, Somewhere in the Northern Atlantic. Shipmate Hendricks cant believe his eyes. He seems to have seen something nobody has seen for decades now. After the US-China war - when every drone, spacelaser and soldier was aimed at every last bird on earth in fear of it being an enemy drone - nobody thought there were any left alive. But out here right there in his visor he sees them clear as day, flying around this small rock in the sea without a care in the world. He hurries to the outboat, sets off towards the island, trying to get a picture with his phone the closer he comes. He struggles to get them in focus as the birds start to fly towards him. A quiet "pop" is all thats heard as Hendricks tumbles to the floor. Lying there, blood pooling around him, his phone now showing the picture he took, finally in focus - clearly showing the motors and metal wings of the drones...

Would maybe make a decent twilight zone clip.

Comment by avadodin 1 hour ago

I knew how it would end.

Comment by pstuart 2 hours ago

Straight out of the world of Philip K Dick.

Comment by _doctor_love 5 hours ago

You inspired me:

Meet Petty Officer Thomas Hendricks. Twenty-six years old. A sailor by profession, a romantic by temperament, and, quite unbeknownst to himself, a man about to make a discovery of considerable scientific importance.

The place: a small island in the North Atlantic. The time: an age in which mankind has grown rather accustomed to the absence of certain things.

But Mr. Hendricks has just spotted something that ought not to be there. And he intends to investigate.

A brief excursion into natural history, with an unscheduled stop... in the Twilight Zone.

Comment by _doctor_love 5 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by talon8635 2 hours ago

We are hellbent on destroying the non-human natural world

Comment by adelekeabdulgan 2 hours ago

As much as I like to be optimistic, I'm struggling to think of any positives to this technology.

it's main function is to breach security systems.

Comment by compass_copium 1 day ago

For those who don't know, the CIA had a similar (unsuccessful) program in the 1960s, which was kept secret for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUILINE

Comment by ofrzeta 18 hours ago

Ornithopter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BklB99ybM

Comment by imhoguy 1 day ago

I wonder if falconry can fill that detection gap. Trained birds are already used to manage wild bird populations at airports. Now time to stop fake birds.

Comment by sellmesoap 1 day ago

I read somewhere that the French government was training golden eagles to attack drones. I've been out fishing and when I had a bite on my line a couple of eagles flew half a KM from a nearby bluff to come check out if I had snacks for them, birds are all about the snacks!

Comment by pixl97 5 hours ago

I'm assuming the real birds would be way more expensive and at high risk of enemy actions against them. A bird bomb smaller than a shotgun shell would be enough to take the bird down if you're suiciding the drone.

Comment by JKCalhoun 1 day ago

Fascinated with ornithopters—probably since reading "Dune", 45 or so years ago as a teenager.

(I may have been fascinated beforehand though—I had a small wind-up one as a kid.)

Kazuhiko Kakuta has a small YouTube channel where he experiments with ornithopter builds (and ornithopter adjacent craft): https://www.youtube.com/@BZH07614/videos

Comment by mysteria 1 day ago

Instead of a full flapping wing thopter I wonder if something prop driven but with moving wings (for show, not propulsion) would be good enough for distant recon. Basically it would look like an RC plane with transparent plastic wings for lift and painted porous flapping wings underneath.

Comment by fedpost 5 hours ago

A lot of radar drone detection is looking for the Doppler signature of the prop. You'd need to use a shrouded edf but then flight times fall off a cliff

Comment by ben-gy 1 day ago

It’s possible, but it would look unnatural to the human eye - you could introduce variable motor speeds to try and mimic bird behaviour when flying in different directions and approaches but from my rabbit holing on the topic I’ve found effort required to get something similar but still not perfect would likely outweigh the effort required to just build it properly.

Comment by odyssey7 1 day ago

I remember once watching a bird in the distance through my binoculars and then how it inexplicably vanished into the distance, seemingly at great speed, not really flapping its wings. Seemed interesting, but I don’t go birdwatching enough to rule out my inexperience in looking at them properly. Maybe the binoculars had given me mild vertigo.

Comment by LadyCailin 1 day ago

It reached the edge of the simulation distance, and was unloaded to increase performance.

Comment by cr125rider 1 day ago

Needs better LOD handling to reduce pop-in. Please file a bug report.

Comment by genxy 1 day ago

Metal Gear Solid

Comment by tamimio 1 day ago

It won’t fly further than a headline, never a practical one. The biggest issue remains (after solving the other two) in drones now is endurance, and unless a breakthrough battery technology changes that, all these cool concepts will never materialize.

Comment by whycombinetor 1 day ago

Power line perch recharging is the solution.

Comment by samrus 1 day ago

Bread crumb refueling

Comment by ajay-b 1 day ago

What is that, technically speaking? Last year I was working for a company that inspects pipelines with drones. They automated land, recharge, on pedestals placed along a route.

Comment by evilduck 1 day ago

Technically speaking, I believe that was a joke.

Comment by bradknowles 1 day ago

The powerline perch stuff does actually work. I’m glad someone else mentioned it here already.

Comment by ajay-b 1 day ago

Ha! Touche.

Comment by pimlottc 1 day ago

So the weird old lady in the park really does work for the CIA!

Comment by nostrademons 1 day ago

I think that endurance is an intrinsic limitation of drones, but I take the opposite conclusion as you. Instead of it meaning drones will never catch on, it'll mean that military missions and consequently the size and structure of the state will adjust their form to suit what drones are good at, rather than drones not catching on. In other words, we'll get drones, but we'll lose nation-states, rather than keeping nation-states but having them fail to adopt drones.

Drones' ability to absolutely dominate the battlefield inside of ~200km is just too powerful. You'll end up with small regional powers that are basically impregnable to invasion, but also can't project power because the range of drones is too short. City-states, basically. And because the defining characteristic of a state is its monopoly on physical force, the structure of the state will adapt to the dominant military technology of the time.

Comment by tamimio 1 day ago

I am not so sure about that, before the whole weaponization of these drones, drone delivery was the hot topic, then changed to “last mile” delivery when dreams hit reality checks, then the whole “urban mobility” with all the connectivity and drones infra to land and take off, rally points, etc etc, and nothing really changed, connectivity is still a challenge, although there are plenty of work arounds (I am even building a platform that will solve a lot of nowadays drones flight issues), but the endurance? Nope, I remember we always hit this as the biggest showstopper in any mission, especially when these missions usually fly with no infra be it cellular or anything that could charge it. The only solution is scientists find a way to make lightweight high endurance batteries.

Comment by adrian_b 1 day ago

Fuel cells can provide autonomy similar to real birds, but for now they remain too expensive.

Comment by rolph 1 day ago

ok this wont win any green points but an RTG generator core will heat a gang of nitanol bands and drive an electric dynamo, it will also be reasonably small enought to fit in a bird sized form factor, and will be thermally hot like a biological.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radioisotope_thermoelectr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

Comment by Jtsummers 1 day ago

This is the size and sort of drones a unit would use for scouting the local area. The range isn't great, but it is suitable for that and less conspicuous than the gas-powered drones used 15 or so years ago and the buzzing quadcopters of today.

Comment by greggsy 1 day ago

Did you fly further than the headline?

> The O1 drone weighs 1 pound and can fly up to 10 kilometers, which is a little more than 6 miles, for over an hour, according to a company fact sheet.

Comment by tamimio 1 day ago

Yes I did, I even built similar ones before, and an hour is barely a number in real scenarios or BVLOS (add preflight post flight check, etc), plus, when you add the connectivity part (anything to allow bvlos) or pro payloads that one hour becomes 10min unless you go fuel. Robotic world has alot of over hype monkey business, don’t trust any “fact” sheet. There’s a reason why balloons are used in some part of the world to carry these drones for long distance.

Comment by signatoremo 1 day ago

Are you sure what you built was SOA? How long ago was that? How do you know it is not an hour with useful payload?

Comment by fc417fc802 5 hours ago

> How do you know it is not an hour with useful payload?

Until they present a much more specific claim (and preferably also supporting evidence) the prevailing assumption is that it's exaggerated bullshit.

Comment by nvme0n1p1 1 day ago

These are winged drones. Gliding takes no energy. Maybe you're confusing drones with quadcopters?

Comment by adrian_b 1 day ago

Gliding takes no energy, but it requires many sensors and a very clever control program. I do no think that anyone has built a drone capable of long-term gliding, yet (i.e. capable to recognize thermal currents and use them for ascending and also capable of gliding a long time without losing much altitude).

Nonetheless, it should possible for a flapping-wing drone to do some short-time gliding between intervals when it uses wing flapping to ascend to the initial height, in order to save some energy.

Comment by SapporoChris 1 hour ago

Materials

To make this glider you need:

1 x balsa piece of 3.2 x 76 x 914 mm (1/8" x 3" x 36")

2 x balsa smaller pieces of 3.2 x 10 x 914 mm (1/8" x 2/5" x 36")

Hot glue

Metal (or plastic) ruller

Comment by ajay-b 1 day ago

I think battery life is a key limiter for this technology but how much time does it need? Something so small that can fly for fifteen minutes to collect intelligence et. al. might be sufficient. For example: a situation in which it is not safe to enter and detection would make it even less safe, ergo using something so tiny for only a few minutes could give valuable feedback to the user.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by GolfPopper 1 day ago

Birds Aren't Real

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real

Comment by LogicFailsMe 1 day ago

Can't say they didn't try to warn us.

Comment by schiffern 1 day ago

I did say "Birds Aren't Real" is plausibly an intentionally ridiculous smokescreen ("all birds aren't real" being clearly farcical), quietly updrafted to obscure any social media reports of real camouflaged intelligence drones. The timing of the meme was very coincidental, happening right when such drones became technically possible IRL.

Naturally, folks reacted like it was a joke. ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34364597

Comment by RecycledEle 17 hours ago

> Birds Aren't Real

Explain what I ate at Chick-Fil-A :o)

Comment by D-Coder 3 hours ago

CIA meat with tracking sensors.

Comment by Rumudiez 5 hours ago

dinosaur meat

Comment by app134 1 day ago

I'm lucky enough to be employed in the robotics space.

It's not that all birds aren't real.

But some birds definitely aren't real.

Comment by varenc 1 day ago

Feels like the end-game is that anti-drone defense turrets are just going to shoot down anything that looks like a bird as well.

Comment by swagasaurus-rex 1 day ago

I worry that it’s easier to build an automated turret that shoots anybody, than it is to build a turret that shoots only enemies.

Comment by fc417fc802 5 hours ago

Probably, but only due to sheer laziness. It should be easy to distinguish electronics from birds at sufficiently close range. Plus I'm certain the physical behavior doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by globular-toast 1 day ago

Oh god, they're going to kill all the birds, aren't they? I wish I was joking.

Comment by p0w3n3d 3 hours ago

Birds are not real

Comment by thisisnotauser 1 day ago

If only there were other spectra that trivially distinguish birds from drones

Comment by metabagel 1 day ago

Are you referring to thermal imaging?

Comment by fc417fc802 5 hours ago

In addition to that birds don't tend to emit much RF. And spectroscopy of the visible light from the materials comprising the body should be quite different unless the drones are covered in harvested genuine feathers.