OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.
There's enormous adoption of autonomous drones.
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.
You have no idea what you're talking about and your video is just a demo from some chinese account. There are tons of footage from drone units, from both sides, and they are all old school analog FPV until the very last moment.
https://x.com/sternenko/status/1770348417102819563
Rather, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. Here is a real frontline video characterizing these systems. Yes, it is all still analog FPV. The lock-on system selects a target and overlays the reticle on the analog video. As the FPV flies closer and encounters the jamming from the target, the lock-on unit ensures it is still a hit.
These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier to get than it used to be but they are still in wide use.
Your link literally says:
> Технологія нова, потребує вдосконалення і масштабування.
> Eng: "The technology is new and will need improvement and scaling"
I don't understand what you're trying to prove. They do exist and I never said they don't. They keep popping up here and there, mainly working in demo conditions against static contrast targets.
My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption. Maybe some, but there's some of everything in this war. All the main uav units that I'm aware of use manually controlled fpvs and there are reasons for that.
> These have fallen out of favor as fiber optic is a little easier
Oh gosh.
> My point was that so far, these things are just curiosities with very limited usage and there's no mass adoption.
Make that point, then! Nothing in your original comment suggested this, just hostile dismissal.
Now that you’ve written a more substantive comment I think we actually agree overall. Most operations in the Ukraine-Russia war are manual piloting. Autonomy is over-hyped overall so far. However! A large number of autonomous systems have still been deployed and interest in autonomy is only growing. Both things can be true at the same time.
> Oh gosh.
Come on, read the whole sentence please. Lock on targeting modules are absolutely being superseded by fiber optic as it becomes “easier” to acquire than it used to be.
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev... was posted by a sibling commenter and is a fairly accurate summary to my knowledge, including a substantiation of the notion that depending on how you look at it, lock on modules were a stop-gap before fiber became available or fiber is a stop-gap before good autonomy becomes widespread.
"OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations."
That's what I literally said, what part if it you did not understand?
Do some research, on FO drones too and just stop embarrass yourself.
Maybe we should come back to this in a few years, I think this will have aged worse than the old dropbox comment.
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.
What the Loyal Wingman program is trying to build is extremely far from what people keep thinking when someone says "drone". The word is overloaded as hell: no one draws a distinction between a quadrotor with a 20 minute flight time and an air breathing jet aircraft costing $20 million a piece.
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).
"when someone says", "no one draws" ... who are these people you're talking about? The folks I listen to make it very clear the kinds of platforms they're talking about, and use different terms to describe things at different levels of specificity.
Many/most folks use the term "drone" to talk about CCA's and other expensive platforms. In fact, "drone warfare" predates the common application to quadcopters, people were calling the Predator drone a drone in the early 2000's. I do agree that calling everything a drone is annoying though, and makes it hard to know what people are talking about. "AI" is having the same problem today.
The general public. If the people you're talking to are military or professionals, then fairly obviously they'll be setting up very precise language and expectations.
But every post vaguely about drones on HN has a whole bunch of people acting like a 1000 quadcopters will replace an F-35.
So I think we’re on the same page when it comes to the layperson’s ignorance on the subject, and I agree the term is mostly useless. I also agree that quadcopters aren’t the endgame of future warfare, although I’ve been entirely shocked at how effective they’ve been so far.
I don’t really put much stock in your average person’s take on warfare generally, so I’m not too bothered by the torrent of misunderstanding. You see the same thing with AI/AGI, and much of it is fueled by those garnering for clicks.
I will say I missed in my original response that the OP was taking exclusively about autonomous devices, and in that case I would agree with their take.
As if the US can compete with china on drone numbers or quality. If drones are the future of war, China will have an enormous advantage in a future war. Let's hope it never comes to that.
Agree 100%, it's a funny strategy but also shows how weak the US hand is - China can pump out extraordinary numbers of these things, and they have pretty incredible tech talent. I wish I didn't live in such interesting times.
Dude, it's not a prediction, it's what is currently happening. If you follow active drone units (from both sides) you'll see that they're all controlled by operators until the last frame.
These bombers attacks were done with manual control too. These drones had LTE modems and on footage it's clearly visible that they controlled by operator.
People can't read these days, especially if it doesn't match the reality they build in their heads.
Oh I see - emphasis on the 'autonomous' part, yeah I would agree on that for today. Things are pretty immature on the autonomous side right now, but that will definitely change ... it's still the military, so it'll take a while, but they'll do it when they're forced to.
I'll skip the shitty retort about not reading.
Are you sure?
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.
Sigh. The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.
> Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed
Lock on a moving target and hit it is not the same as put waypoints in INAV. My point was that there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones, overwhelming majority of hits, on both sides, are done with regular FPV drones with very standard school hardware that's barely modified for combat use (namely: custom frequencies for VTX and ERLS).
> there's still no mass adoption of target locking or self-aiming drones
As long as you define ‘drone’ as a tiny quadrotor. Missiles like Sidewinder and Hellfire, cruise missiles like Tomahwak, fire-and-forget MANPADs, GPS-guided gravity bombs, even ICBMs with MIRV warheads. All autonomously travel to their target and destroy it.
There are even some loitering anti-tank missiles that climb up above the launching aircraft and sit on a parachute for a while until they see a tank to destroy. The pilot never has to see the tank.
All autonomous and adopted.
The main novelty in the electric drone tech is very very low cost.
> The tires on the planes thing is very clear to anyone who served in russian/soviet army.
Why is this, for the rest of us?
To imitate.
There was order from the higher ups: protect the planes. There was no specific order like "build a garages for planes". So they put tires on planes and called it protection. Now soldiers have to move tires around, fill the journals, sign them up. New procedures are developed. Order is fulfilled. Everyone was happy. May be someone even got a promotion for creating a plane defence system so cheap.
If you know more about it, you seem to now more than this source at cent-com https://www.twz.com/air/russia-covering-its-aircraft-in-tire...
If you can get a GPS fix (or a lat long to start), you can run an INS just as easily.
Most of the conversation here is focused on cheap drones. Are there cheap Inertial Navigation Systems (INS)? As I understand, it only appears inside of multi-million dollar cruise/ballistic missiles, fighter jets, and long-range bombers. Please correct me if I am wrong. Also, it might be that there are cheap INS systems that are good enough (e.g., "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"), plus a bit of AI-enabled vision on the drone camera.
Yes, you can buy an IMU as a single IC for less than $5[1]. Otherwise your smartphone probably already have all the required sensors.
Of course, those have significantly less performance than the one you put in an airliner or ballistic missile.
As you mention yourself, its a question of good enough. You need to be a lot more accuracy to hit a city after a twenty minute sub-orbital coast, than to find the nearby trench. And yes, computer vision is used to correct for drift.
[1]: IMU's on DigiKey: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/motion-sensors/im...
An interesting paper just published about the current state of AI in Ukrainian and Russian drones on the battlefield [1].
"Promises of an immediate AI/ML drone revolution are premature as of June 2025, given that both Russian and Ukrainian forces will need to allocate more time, testing, and investment to deploy these drones on the frontlines en masse. Russia and Ukraine will continue improving their ML and machine vision capabilities while training and testing AI capabilities. Russia and Ukraine will then need to tackle the issue of scaling the production of the new AI/ML drones that will require additional time and resources to facilitate. Russia and Ukraine may start to use some AI/ML drones to carry out specific tasks in the meantime, such as striking certain types of targets like armored equipment or aircraft, before learning to fully operate on the battlefield. AI/ML drones are also unlikely to fully replace the need for the mass of tactical FPV drones over the coming months because the latter are cheaper to produce and adapt to the current battlefield conditions at the current state of technology."
[1] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/battlefield-ai-rev...
Remember when TB-2s and grenade bombers were the peak of drone technology in Ukraine? That was like 2 years ago, now the frontlines are draped in equal parts anti-drone netting and fiberoptic threads.
The recent picture of sun rising or setting above a field of fiber threads really drives the point home. At peace time you have to pay $50k to get fiber to the home. At war it’s coming at you at 50mph and you can’t do anything to stop it.
Do you follow this war closely? Show me which drone units adopted anything autonomous, just name it. There are cases when they are used but there's no mass adoption, they all use regular FPV and FO drones.
Anti-anti-drone avoidance systems on Russian zala's is the only example of autonomous action that I can remember.
There is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.
Yeah. I guess military taboo and export control schemes/scare tactics is doing phenomenal jobs restraining and de-escalating use of computers in arms development. Less money spent improving means to kill people might be good, but the long gap between the cutting edge of technology in general to technology applied to military domain feels weird.
I think people are missing the word "autonomous" here, which means you're right .. so far. I wouldn't bet against it changing.