I’ve enjoyed Mark Rober’s videos for a while now. They are fun and accessible topics, cute concepts, and decent production value. But this recent video isn’t sitting right with me


The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU

In it, he talks about a few techniques for how to take down “bad guy drones”, the problems with each, and then shows off the drone tech by Anduril as a solution.

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

Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.

In the video, the Anduril product is a heavy drone that uses kinetic energy to destroy other drones (by flying into them). Quoting the person in the video:

imagine a children’s bowling ball thrown at twice as fast as a major league baseball fastball, that’s what it’s like getting hit by Anvil


This technology is scary for obvious reasons, especially in the wrong hands. What I also don’t like is how Mark Rober’s content is aimed at children, and this video includes a large segment advertising the children’s products he is selling. Despite that, it is showing off military technology with serious ethical implications.

There’s even a section in the video where they show off the Roadrunner, compare it against the patriot missiles, and loosely tie it in to defending against drones.

Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner built for ground-based air defense that can rapidly launch, identify, intercept, and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats — or be safely recovered and relaunched at near-zero cost.

  • Sconrad122@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    How nearby is nearby though? And, in the context of the proposed use case for defending a crowded stadium in a populated area, does this put people down range as well that could also be impaired by the pellets?

    • Monkey With A Shell@lemmy.socdojo.com
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      5 months ago

      Crowded spaces it’s a problem, I was more talking to notion of just plain shooting them rather than a use case. A rifle would be dang near impossible, but a scattered spray, you really only need to stop one prop and it’s probably on the ground for a standard 4 prop deal. At least mine got real screwy when a blade split mid flight.

    • daltotron@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The optimal sweet spot is probably like 40 meters or something, within 20 or 10 meters and the drone is probably in range to drop a grenade or explode, and becomes much harder to hit because it’s capable of making much quicker direction changes relative to where you’re standing even as it presents a larger target to you as a consequence of being closer, and a whole lot farther out, and birdshot can’t really cut it.

      Edit: Oh I was also gonna say, for indoor spaces, it’d maybe be not a good idea even just for hearing protection, but barring that, you could just opt for something lower velocity which you’d probably pack for this occasion if you’re defending a set location, and then just load what you need in like 2 seconds. I imagine most drones are going to be flying around above head height anyways, so the main worry would be debris and falloff. You can’t prevent debris from the drone really unless you have a net drone or something, and the falloff on the backend of a lower velocity or frangible birdshot with less mass is probably not super consequential except maybe in the case of eye protection. Some sort of ceramic bullet or maybe even steel bbs would probably work without doing too much damage. More than a drone, anyways. It’s not as though a drone that rams into another drone is a particularly safe thing, in any case.