The Art of SQL Query Optimization (jnidzwetzki.github.io)
3 points by thunderbong 39m ago 0 comments
SaaS Launch Checklist for the Vibecoding Era (lightrains.com)
2 points by niksmac 59m ago 1 comments
Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
127 picture 99 6/4/2025, 8:03:43 PM tudelft.nl ↗
A few details I picked up:
* The drones are a spec drone across the league. It's a fairly large-footprint FPV racing drone (it's a 5" propped drone, but it's very stretched out and quite heavy) with both a Betaflight flight controller and a Jetson Orin NX onboard. Teams were only allowed an IMU and a single forward camera.
* It's unclear to me whether the teams were allowed to bypass the typical Betaflight flight controller which is present on the drone and use direct IMU input and ESC commands from the Jetson, or whether they were sending and receiving commands from the flight controller and relying on its onboard rate stabilization PID loop.
DCL is kind of a weird drone racing league since it's made for TV; it's mostly simulator based with, more recently, only few real events a year. The spec DCL drone isn't very capable compared to the more open-specification drones in racing leagues like MultiGP, in large part to keep the events more spectator friendly. This probably makes it more amenable to AI, which is an interesting side effect.
> One of the core new elements of the drone’s AI is the use of a deep neural network that doesn’t send control commands to a traditional human controller, but directly to the motors.
Feels kinda similar to the innovation around manned aircraft about 100 years ago when we went from toy/observation platform to killing machine in only a couple of decades. With the ardupilot news today, it was hard to not watch this and imagine the applications to a combat environment.
A lot of comments are trying to draw connections to combat drones, but drone racing like this has been a hobby thing for a long time. The capabilities of the drones are set to have an even playing field, not to match combat drones or anything.
These aren't meant to have any parallels to combat drones, drones that fly long distances, or drones that carry payloads.
It's really just a special-purpose hobby thing for flying through a series of gates very quickly. Flight time measured in a couple minutes, no provisions for carrying weight.
> The course design pushed the boundaries of perception-based autonomy—featuring wide gate spacing, irregular lighting, and minimal visual markers. The use of rolling shutter cameras further heightened the difficulty, testing each team’s ability to deliver fast, stable performance under demanding conditions
https://a2rl.io/press-release/9/artificial-intelligence-triu...
The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”
It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
“Nothing.”
--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other.
>The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
>or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing
just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it.
In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service.
This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.
The cat is definitely out of the bag.
Nice.
Even without vulnerabilities like that, something like https://comma.ai/openpilot could very likely be used in the same way ArduPilot was used in the recent Ukrainian drone attacks.
The hard part is that there is no effective way to regulate anything in the supply chain involved except for the explosives themselves. Everything else is super commoditized at this point and, other than the props, very multi-purpose. The first significant hexcopter I built used a BeagleBone Blue for processing, generic ESCs and BLDCs for the motors, and an aluminum frame that I cut out of aluminum tubes from Home Depot. Max takeoff weight was 55lb, because that’s the heaviest it could legally take off with. This was 7 years ago.
A large number of front-line FPV drones are equipped with automated last-second targeting systems like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coUwYOyIoAU , based on Chinese NPU IP / CCTV systems and readily available as full solutions on Aliexpress. The basic idea is that if the drone loses control or video link due to EW countermeasures, it can continue to the last target.
Loitering and long-range fixed wing reconnaissance drones have been fully autonomous since the beginning. One common recent technique taken from traditional "big" militaries is the use of loitering autonomous high altitude base stations with Starlink or LTE on them providing coverage to the battlefield below, since it's much harder to jam things when they are flying high above the ground.
Governments are falling over themselves to: acquire drones, figure out how to defend against existing and future drones, and to figure out how to exploit them well. Given the recent attack against Russian bombers, I find it hard to take you seriously here.
Hell, the US knows it can't compete with China on aircraft numbers, and is placing its money on collaborative combat aircraft to give it the advantage. That's about as strong an endorsement as you can get.
But then they go and say "drone swarms will defeat all future adversaries!"
Like in the Ukrainian context everyone seems to think the drone swarm was the deciding factor and is saying "this will replace air forces!"...kind of ignoring the multi month infiltration and espionage operation which got those systems in range (they were literally trucked right up to almost the fence line).
One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems.
Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
I’m really curious how this would perform in messier, less controlled environments.
Update: I'm not saying people shouldn't develop this, we're never going to squash human curiosity. But when I see this kind of stuff, I'm deeply troubled by how bad actors (state and non-state) will use this.
I hope our security services are working hard on countering these potential threats.
Cons: massive invasion of privacy and probably illegal.
Pros: looks cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
It's really cool to see this happening fully autonomously and at such high speed. I wonder if the use of AI means that the approach is fundamentally different, or if it uses the same principle of minimizing snap?
https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_co...
or was it overfitted to this specific course?
1. I didn't see it stated explicitly, but I presume the neural net is on the far end of a radio link somewhere, not running on hardware physically mounted on the drone?
2. After viewing the FPV video on the linked page: how the hell do human pilots even come close to this pace? Insane (even assuming that the video they're seeing is higher quality than what's shown on YouTube – is it?)
3. The control software has access to an IMU. This seems to represent some degree of unfair advantage? I presume the human pilots don't have that – unless the IMU data is somehow overlaid onto their FPV view (but even then, I can't imagine how much practice would be needed to learn to make use of that in realtime).
2) No, the video the pilot sees is usually quite bad. Racing pilots usually use either HDZero (mid resolution video with weird pixel artifacts sometimes) or analog video (looks like a broken 1980s VCR). It’s amazing what they can fly through. These DCP spec drones are also slow by racing standards. Look up MultiGP racing, it’s even faster.
3) It can be overlaid but it’s useless. The human pilot is using the control sticks as the input to an outer rate regulation loop which contains the gyro as input to an inner stabilization loop though, so the IMU is still in the mix for human control.
2. The video they're seeing is worse. Spectators typically see the frames saved directly from the camera, but the pilot will be seeing them compressed and beamed over the air to their headset. See vid.
3. The human pilots do actually have access to it. Not directly, but the flight controller translates their inputs and makes use of the IMU to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE
I’m reminded of when the US military figured out it should just replace all its proprietary field drone controllers with Xbox controllers because every single grunt that enlisted already had 10,000 hours on the things. If the future of warfare is drones, Christ, that video is terrifying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
Ah yes. No mention of the real big use case
Since I can't access.
I got out of doing drone work because of all the FAA restrictions on where you can fly drones now. Within 30 miles of a major metro area? Nope. Within 20 miles of an airport? Nope. I'm exaggerating of course, but it got to a point where I was having real problems trying to find areas where you can fly a drone just for fun so I just gave up and quit.
My more immediate fear would be how the gov can control who and where these drones will be able to fly. If some revolutionary built a swarm of drones, it would be pretty easy (I would think) for the gov to just jam the signal and shut them down.
The parts? I'm not worried about. Its the gov holding the keys to access that makes me more worried.
No gps, no fiber, no 5g, no jamming except microwaves. A python file and a target.
Scary times ahead.