As of: March 17, 2024, 8:45 p.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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Cheap, quickly built and completely deaf: US students have now designed a drone that is resistant to influences from electronic warfare.
(Symbolic image) © dpa
It's dirt cheap, ready in no time and extremely stubborn: US students are building a cheap drone with the capabilities of a cruise missile.
El Segundo / Los Angeles - They are between 20 and 24 years old and could be considered "nerds" - depending on the definition, colloquially as "imbeciles", "nerds", "eccentrics", "loners" or "idiots".
Other sources see such types less as outsiders and more as people who advance society - similar to an Archimedes or a Bill Gates.
In Ukraine they could soon simply be considered heroes, because they have probably devised something that could bring Vladimir Putin to his knees in the Ukraine war: a drone that both costs comparatively pocket money and stubbornly follows its course to the target because she is deaf to noise.
Der
Spiegel
is already raving about it as a possible alternative to Taurus.
In fact, it could reignite the so far unsuccessful counteroffensive against Russia.
As a result of a 24-hour hackathon in El Segundo, California, a trio of three young engineers claimed that all they needed was a 3D printer and around 450 euros for a drone that calculates its GPS coordinates without a signal, using an algorithm that Compares satellite images from Google Maps with images from your camera.
The drone prototype shares similarities with the Tomahawk cruise missile's contour-adapted guidance system, but was developed at a fraction of the cost and time.
The highlight of the bargain: The system should be resistant to electronic interference signals, “jamming” or “spoofing” –
Aviation Week
reports on this .
Drone jamming and drone spoofing: the hostile takeover
Jamming
is the deliberate use of a transmission-blocking signal to disrupt communication between a drone and its pilot.
Once a signal blocks a drone, the transmitter can force the drone to
to land on the spot and stop any further movement, or
to return to the 'home' position.
This is a normal function of a drone with GPS and a home tracking function.
It is designed so that if the connection is lost, your drone will return to its starting location.
Spoofing
a drone refers to the remote takeover of the drone by a third party by impersonating the original remote control.
The drone receives a signal that is intended to confuse the drone so that it thinks the spoofing signal is legitimate - which is a mistake.
Spoofing enables a third party
to take over the drone and control the further flight or
Download data from the drone or view the camera recordings.
The team that founded a start-up called Theseus wanted to keep their flying-wing drone as cost-effective, simple and highly efficient as possible;
so that future defense will be possible without global corporations.
The UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) components – including the airframe and control surface hinges – were 3D printed in five hours and assembled within two hours.
The electronics are sourced off-the-shelf, says team member Carl Schoeller, a mechanical engineering student at Stanford University.
This drone could turn things around in Ukraine and beat Russia on its own principles: with cheap, disposable weapons thrown en masse to the front.
Quantity instead of class: Experts advise Ukraine to go the Russian route
The online magazine
Breaking Defense
had already paid homage to this principle a year ago - without, however, being able to foresee the technical innovative spirit of the American nerds: The next logical step in the arms race with mini drones would be for Ukraine to use the drones against electronic attacks to toughen warfare - but several experts have argued that it probably wouldn't be worth it.
Instead, the answer would simply be to buy and fly more drones, i.e. quantity rather than quality.
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“The system does not have to compare coordinates.
It just knows where it is.
If you’ve been to Italy, you’ll be able to recognize Italy when you see it again.”
Drone designer Sacha Levy told Aviation Week
Accordingly, even in war, quantity gains its own quality: the cheaper the material, the more risky it can be used, and losses lose their meaning compared to deployment - Ukraine should copy this principle from the Russians, recommends the American Zachary Kallenborn, for example , as
Breaking Defense
writes: According to the political scientist from George Mason University, it makes economic sense alone to invest a few thousand in drones to protect individual soldiers from being ambushed or from sending artillery shells with many times their material value in the worst case, firing past the target.
Kallenborn: The cheaper the drones are, the more aggressively they can be used because their losses remain virtually insignificant.
In principle, according to experts, Ukraine has no choice but to consistently rely on drones, predicts the American
Foreign Policy Magazine
;
In other words: If Ukraine could see everything on and behind the front, including units and even individual troops moving in its rear, the classic ground attack using armored mass formations would become an outdated tactic for Russia.
In the age-old military race between hiding and detecting, the latter appears to have won - at least until the next wave of technology shifts the balance again.
US engineers are making drone technology unbeatably cheap
Traditional military strategies and defense prime contractors that have invested heavily in centralized and expensive hardware are unable to win in a new era of conflict, according to the student trio.
The US IT tinkerers are convinced that traditional military strategies are outdated, as they told
Aviation Week
: “A Tomahawk missile costs two million dollars, which we think is a little ridiculous - it's a metal tube with some fertilizer on the back “says Schoeller.
“We don’t think blowing up one of these every time you want to complete a mission is feasible in the future if you have an opponent who is at least as economically powerful as you.”
The Theseus team assumes that for a small drone to detect its location almost anywhere, it does not need to carry and process a gigantic database of satellite images, repeatedly matching features with the UAV's camera view.
Instead, it can be trained on the relationships between specific GPS coordinates and local terrain features using a deep learning model called Large Vision Transformer.
The drone gets an intuitive impression of the earth's surface, which the original satellite images could not achieve.
The drone with memories: Once it has seen Italy, it recognizes Italy
Artificial intelligence should make this possible;
The drone acts autonomously, so to speak, based on stored and processed knowledge, so it is independent of external control and ultimately deaf to external influences.
The trio is working on navigation precision that would stay within a radius of five meters 95 percent of the time, explains
team member Sacha Levy, a doctoral student in computer science at Yale University, to
Aviation Week .
Levy: “The system does not have to compare coordinates.
It just knows where it is.
If you’ve been to Italy, you’ll be able to recognize Italy when you see it again.”
For both opponents in the Ukraine war, drone defense is an undertaking with many unknowns - and has long since extended into the electronic circuits - drone defense initially means making the smallest aircraft visible.
For the eye or the radar.
Because current drones largely fly with parts from hardware stores, they are very sensitive to radio interference, defense specialist Steve Wright tells Newsweek.
According to
Fortune Business Insights,
the global market for military drones will grow from the current 13.3 billion euros to 33.4 billion euros in 2030.
And Ukraine is the laboratory situation for the engineers of future military conflicts.
Ukraine has been working on a “drone army” for a long time.
Conventional warfare is simply unaffordable in the long term, and Ukraine is therefore forced to make progress.
Furthermore, there is a stalemate on the ground.
In the space of electromagnetic waves, Russia's army appears to be on the offensive and has an advantage: it dominates electronic warfare in the Ukraine war.
That's why the trio thinks big on a small scale - their idea: tens of thousands of cheap, networked drones.
It's much easier to target one big project than to get lost in thousands or hundreds of thousands of small projects, says team member Schoeller.
As soon as you set up a network of these small drones in the sky, many interesting options would arise.
(Karsten Hinzmann)