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Comments (102)

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  dmos62
  Someone here said "[Russian] tactical units", "smoke grenades". They must be joking.A drone like this is defending against 2-3 50-year-olds without military experience wading through a bombed out tree-line into almost certain death, because there are literal firing squads waiting if they don't. With a huge round like 12.7, all you have to do is fire pot shots in the general vicinity while drone pilots do the rest. Also, these can be life-savers for an outpost when weather conditions ground all drones.This is a fluff piece, but these machines might become very real very soon. They're already used for resupply and dropping mines. We have plenty of videos of that from both sides. A few months ago we had a video of one of these taking out an infantry carrier. This is not vaporware. It's a bad approach at worst, but I wouldn't be surprised if this grows exponentially for many years to come.
• Animats
  This is a standard unit from DevDroid.[1] Here's the marketing video.[2] It's available for pre-order. They also have a model with a grenade launcher.[1] https://devdroid.tech/en/catalog/droid-tw[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oay_-cAlLXE
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  aprentic
  Reading between the lines of the article it seems advanced but not too surprising.I assume that at night when it "withdrew to a covered location" there was opportunity for maintenance, battery swaps, etc.The article says that it successfully carried out "multiple calls for fire." That sounds like over those 45 days there were multiple missions to provide suppressive fire. They're not explicit about what that means but it sounds like, "if you see anything moving in this arc, take a few shots at them". Presumably there's some AI to prevent it from wasting ammo on really dumb decoys.A "simple" mobile automated turret has been around for a while. The novelty they would be demonstrating is essentially battlefield robustness. They aren't claiming that this machine can operate completely autonomously for 6 weeks but the incremental pieces are still hard.
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  aogaili
  At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day?Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game?In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose.If you think about, we moved human one-on-one battles to MMA and combat sport, this allowed channeling individual human aggression in a controlled environment. The future war might be not very different, swarm of drones fighting other swarm of drones while others watching on the news, who can build, manage and deploy smarter and more effective drones. If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat.
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  mullingitover
  I’ve been wondering when modern battlefields would get Team Fortress 2 sentries.
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  krunck
  Why is no one using EMP devices against drones?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Non-nucl...
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  outside2344
  We really are trying our best to make Terminator reality aren't we?
• throwaway85825
  The proportion of videos featuring drones taking out other drones is increasing.
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  spyder
  But how it was not destroyed by flying Russian drones? Did it shot them down? Or did it have some anti-drone support unit helping it?
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  giacomoforte
  This is surely the future. At some point we will eventually have battles fought entirely by pilot(less) drones? And then war becomes purely economical.
• reenorap
  > each evening, it withdrew to a covered location.Why? Isn't the advantage that it can stay in a position indefinitely? Does it not have infrared cameras, etc?
• philip1209
  > each evening, it withdrew to a covered location.Interesting - why?
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  AftHurrahWinch
  "It takes infantry to hold territory" is still true I guess, but now it's a single operator in a bunker.
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  mrhottakes
  My car also held position for 6 weeks during the winter storms
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  superjan
  But what if it gets hacked by the russians?
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  CrzyLngPwd
  This is on my 2026 bingo card of things that never happened.
• anon
  undefined
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  ck2
  So what happens in a few years when a submarine pulls up some miles off US coast and unleashes 100 super-automated drones to terrorize the country?Heck maybe not even a sub needed, some smaller country could have an automated tiny raft too small to be seen on radar tow in the dronesThey could charge via phantom power from powerlines and will find a way around GPS jamming
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  andrewstuart
  Is there some sort of hybrid flying/stationary drone that flys in an sits to hold a ground position?
• pirbull
  looks like a treadmill
• lovegrenoble
  Another con job...
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  SirFatty
  Not a drone...
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  gclawes
  Are these the ones controlled by Steam Decks?
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  roysting
  This smells more like military propagand, i.e., bullshit.There is no way this is honest or real, i.e., it somehow fought off a tactical unit trying to take the frontline that this drone was holding? Or was it just parked in some area where there was no tactical point of even taking the territory?Just by virtue of its nature, a single drone and/or a well placed dumb grenade, not even to mention likely a smoke grenade could have easily defeated this thing within seconds of deployment if there was any interest in taking the area this toy was "controlling".Someone is doing a literal con job to get military graft and fraud contracts.
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  naizarak
  Nice marketing pitch. In reality it was probably parked at an empty crossroads 10 miles behind the frontline, taking potshots at "suspected" enemy positions.
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  crazygringo
  Are these called drones? I thought drones flew.The article calls this a "Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle armed with a machine gun" and the headline calls it a "Ukrainian Combat Robot". Not a "drone" like the submitter's title has.Edit: it seems like the creator calls it a "droid". Is that just them, or is that becoming standard terminology for a kind of ground-based "soldier-robot"? See:https://devdroid.tech/en/catalog/droid-tw