[swamp40]

I don't see fly-by-fiber getting very popular. The only goal is anti-jamming. But if the drone was fully autonomous, there would be no signals to jam. And the fully autonomous drones are coming fast. Meta's SAM 2 can follow pretty much any object anywhere, and people are beginning to get it running on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin. That's 75% of the work. The other 25% is autopilot and a way to disable it if it flies back over friendly territory. 6 months I'd say, for amateurs starting now. I'm sure some companies already have prototypes working.

[jrexilius]

There are multiple roles for a small airborne asset. One of them is ISR (video feed), used for targeting artillery or movement tracking and such. Jamming can block the down stream feed and defeat that support role.

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

Anti-jamming is the intermediate goal. Fly by fiber allows the pilot to retain control of the drone while over the battlefield.

With a completely autonomous drone in contested space (presumably with EW around), there's no way for a pilot to tell the drone "fly a little to the left to see what's behind that tree." Each drone has very specific use cases.

[pbmonster]

That just moves the arms race from anti-jamming to anti-ML targeting, doesn't it?

Litter your trenches in inflatable mannequins (anti-CV), put all your soldiers in ghillie suits (anti-CV), have cheap fireworks ready to spread chaff (anti-radar) and flares (anti-IR).

[nostrademons]

Any reasonable autonomous control system is going to have sensor fusion to combine different wavelengths of sensor data together. Kalman Filters are a thing, even outside of military applications. You're going to need countermeasures that are anti-CV, anti-radar, and anti-IR measures in one source to confuse a well-made autonomous drone.

Even then, if they just put a bullet into anything that has the approximate optical & heat signature of a human, it'll work fine. Who cares if you blow up a few inflatable mannequins and flares if you also get all the soldiers?

[ImHereToVote]

The obvious solution is to target civilians with autonomous drones. Not much different to sanctions in terms of civilian casualties, but much more effective at stopping the enemy infrastructure. Since sanctions mostly kill children and the elderly.

[holoduke]

Autonomous can still be jammed. They can and probably will still use gps, visual info, sonar, sound, magnetic fields, or pressure. All which can be jammed from the outside. And this is already happening.

[some_random]

ISR is probably more important than hunter-killer drones, at least right now

[trabant00]

Any fully autonomous drone that can be produced in the near future will be easily foolable. And if it has a remote fail-safe deactivation system the enemy can figure it out and deactivate it too. So you solved absolutely nothing of what a wire solves. And made the same pitch we have for every ML product right now: we're X% there, next year we're there. When in fact next year we're still going to be next year away from there.

[LorenPechtel]

There's a simple way to build a failsafe that the enemy can't figure out. The basic rule of cryptography--assume your enemy knows everything but the key.

When the launcher and the drone connect they make up a completely random key. It is known only to the launcher and the drone. The drone will self destruct if it receives said key. The enemy could jam the destruct but they couldn't trigger it. Note that no encryption is even needed.

One time pads are inherently unbreakable crypto other than by compromising the pad. And in this case the secret is known only to the drone and controller.

[m463]

One goal could be really high bandwidth. Wonder if you could power it somehow too (or would that need copper or other conductive metal?)

[JoachimS]

fly-by-fiber used to be very popular. And still is. The systems Russia is getting from North Korea is fly-by-fiber. Though I agree that autonomous drones is probably where we are heading. Ukraina has already shown swarms of autonomous drones working together.

You even have different types of drones providing different function. A mama drone carrying smaller drones to the place of operation for example.

[AlbertCory]

Maybe look at real-world use of drones right now in Ukraine? Where it's literally life and death.

[fennecbutt]

Which is humorous to me as consumer drones get these sorts of features, meanwhile the military industrial complex charges 100-1000x the price.

"But they have to test to guarantee safety"

Nobody cares, there's a reason Ukraine is using cheap consumer/commercial drones, because they're effective as hell, and you get much more bang for buck without most of your money going into the back pockets of defense company executives.

If national defense is sooooo important, why aren't defense companies publicly owned?