If you participate in this competition you’re effectively giving free research to a weapons company who will use it to improve their killer drones. I’m not judging but that’s what this is. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.
I only say this because technologists sometimes don’t think about the reasons behind things, they just see a fun problem to solve.
Anduril is far ahead of anything we can produce here for this competition, but it's certainly a great method for them to identify potential talent who can bring needed skills to their team, hence the grand prize of a job offer. The terms of the competition is they get to use any submission for marketing purposes but the IP remains with the participants. Personally I'm in the camp that the world has bad guys, and they are building technology too. Smartest to make sure yours is better. Professionally we only work on defensive systems, which are in high demand these days.
We can defend from drones without building our own autonomous drone killing machines. The real danger here is that we have bad guys at home who will use this tech on us if we give them the chance, so personally I’m opposed to building it. Not like I can do anything other than comment here and vote.
I’m really not judging anyone who does, there’s a lot of nuance here that honestly makes it hard to argue you’re wrong or I’m right in this discussion.
Completely agree, details matter for sure. I just returned from a visit to Odessa Ukraine, and observed a maelstrom of drone on drone combat right outside my hotel window to booms and shaking glass. Those experiences make me want to help defend against the indiscriminate strikes however I can. But I concede there is danger in providing the tools.
> Personally I'm in the camp that the world has bad guys, and they are building technology too. Smartest to make sure yours is better.
I get the idea, but it is also the same argument that has fueled the nuclear arms race that stuck all of us in this permanent launch-on-warning, mutually assured destruction situation.
The only reason we’re in this mess with Iran is a dumbass president; as for Russia, same thing. I’m not gonna reward the military industrial complex just because they backed a moron.
On topic: I would prefer we research defenses for drones instead of drones themselves.
I totally agree, very interested anti-drone defenses. You can actually use much of this to model and simulate the drones you want to stop just as well.
I would prefer our drone defenses actually work against real drones, and that only happens by having real opponents. Or do you not believe in red teaming?
That isn’t real opponents, it’s useful for training but you don’t need actual drones to red team. I don’t know how many times I had to use my imagination in the military when we were fighting paper opponents that were non existent but we had to maneuver and walk through processes as if we had a missile inbound. Or those situations where we had a real target but we weren’t allowed to actually shoot at it because it was reserved for another unit to actually shoot at.
the included baseline just demonstrates that the Betaflight controller will indeed move to the hard-coded center positions of each gate. So the basic first solver task would be to replace that with a CV or ML inference based approach. We plan to add another demo solver into the sample set that shows this next, currently in progress.
Both great tools, optimized for slightly different needs. Gazebo is great for simulation and testing of higher level control, or for simulation that doesn't require 1000hz sensor simulation rate. Nvidia Isaac focuses on ML model training workflows, not ideal for interacting directly with your flight software for flight testing your code before you fly. This aims to be software CI/CD for your drone builds.
I only say this because technologists sometimes don’t think about the reasons behind things, they just see a fun problem to solve.
I’m really not judging anyone who does, there’s a lot of nuance here that honestly makes it hard to argue you’re wrong or I’m right in this discussion.
I get the idea, but it is also the same argument that has fueled the nuclear arms race that stuck all of us in this permanent launch-on-warning, mutually assured destruction situation.
On topic: I would prefer we research defenses for drones instead of drones themselves.