China made the best drones, now Anduril does

https://palmerluckey.com/america-is-back-on-top-baby/

by MikusR • 6 years ago

37 34 6 years ago

sneak2• 6 years ago

Context, from wikipedia, that sheds some light on the nationalistic headline:

In June 2017, Luckey co-founded the defense technology company Anduril, along with former Palantir Technologies executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf, and early Oculus hardware lead Joe Chen.[40] (Anduril, like Palantir, is named after an object from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings.) In March 2018, Anduril began a pilot program for the U.S. government to detect illegal immigrants attempting to enter Texas from Mexico; the program led to 55 attempted entrants being caught in its first 12 days in operation.

This post is advertising for a drone company that sells surveillance equipment to the militarized federal police department in the US that is responsible for running the concentration camps in Texas.

skavi• 6 years ago

Looks like a fairly well designed machine. I wish it wasn't so oriented around the whole making the world a worse place thing.

georgeburdell• 6 years ago

Your post could do without the "concentration camp" flame-bait; it diminishes the phrase for those with family members who died in actual concentration camps during WWII. Drones are basically a toy weapon, so your complaint is that a for-profit company that sells toy weapons would pursue business from its largest potential customer.

sneak2• 6 years ago

Not flamebait, just facts.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...

snowwrestler• 6 years ago

Setting aside the question of Anduril, “concentration camp” is a general term that is not specific to Nazi Germany’s death camps. The U.S. operated concentration camps for people (including U.S. citizens) of Japanese national origin during WWII.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp

The topic is super partisan right now, but in the long run, the current U.S. detention centers near the southern border have a good chance of being considered concentration camps because of the intense and overt focus on the national origin and ethnicity of those detained. Immigrants of other ethnicities, even those without entry visas or other documentation problems, are not being similarly detained.

ETHisso2017• 6 years ago

This sounds like the ad for slaughterbots.

imtringued2• 6 years ago

I always laugh at that video because once you realize what applications loitering munitions have in real life they are not much more dangerous than a tank shell or recoilless rifle. Meanwhile what slaughterbots is showing is already happening except it overly dramatizes it. The USA sends drones and deploys hellfire missiles against suspected terrorists killing innocent people in the process. The video is just some FUD crap trying to make toys look dangerous. Tattletail and Five Nights at Freddy’s are horror games that take advantage of this emotion.

I would be more worried about current governments that are committing genocide with good old fashioned guns or chemical weapons. Drones are just one more tool in an existing arsenal.

emcq• 6 years ago

This is FUD. Skydio has produced and sold amazing drones in the US for several years. Both are invested in by Andreessen Horowitz and Palmer almost certainly knows about them.

coolspot3• 6 years ago

Actually reading the post would tell you that he means that Anduril just released best Inspire-sized drone for military use.

Skydio is great drone, but it is toy-sized plastic drone.

Specifications of the Ghost 4 are really impressive: 100 minutes flight time with couple pounds of payload powered by standard Li-ion batteries, rugged design and materials, low sound signature and thin visible profile, on-board AI, swarming, autonomy, etc.

coolspot3• 6 years ago

Impressive:

Ghost is a single-rotor aircraft. The mechanicals of the rotor system are harder to design and manufacture than a DJI-style quadcopter, and flight controls are harder to program, but the result is much lower aerodynamic disk loading that results in longer endurance (over 100 minutes with real mission payloads), near-silent acoustic signature, high max payload capacity (dozens of pounds), and high speed. Compare this with a DJI Inspire 2, a high-end offering that costs $3000 that can lumber around with a couple pounds for 24 to 27 minutes, props screaming.
Ghost is autonomous, powered by an onboard AI Core that can perform 32 trillion operations per second.

baybal23• 6 years ago

Single rotor controls are much, much simpler.

At least it does not require a mandatory PID control to not fall out of the sky.

Very little math involved in control of a helicopter. A 3 actuator type with 1 actuator for each axis basically has no need for any control signal manipulation, and can be made fully analog.

And a helicopter can be made more or less statically stable by pure mechanics, and aerodynamics.

P.S.

It doesn't seem that the drone in question exist in anything, but CGI at the moment.

P.P.S.

And quite unsound CG at that. On some of their CG shots, a swashplate actuators are attached with their axis coincidal with that rotor..., and a tail rotor control yoke not attached to anything...

tristan123456• 6 years ago

This is an ad, not more not less?

heckerhut• 6 years ago

Wow, this guy has a war fetish. Makes the ideas and intent behind OR and its subsequent sale to FB all the more questionable. Sick, sick world.

artifact_44• 6 years ago

Yup. I was pretty sad when I found out he was a right winger.

jayspell• 6 years ago

Really? You would rather the guy building it was associated with CCP?

d1lanka• 6 years ago

I mean, I get your sentiment, but what's the alternative?

So far, this tech seems to be recon + defense oriented and not straight up slaughterbot killer drones etc.

If we aren't building it, someone else will - and I'd rather us have this than China etc. or some other authoritarian government.

xnx• 6 years ago

Seems like a drone with these characteristics could have a lot of nonmilitary uses as well: search and rescue, wildlife research, small deliveries, etc.

jacknews• 6 years ago

I realise this isn't aimed at us civilian plebs (yet, lol!), but still, I guess the old adage applies, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Unless I missed the price sticker somewhere?

baybal23• 6 years ago

Take a look on Yamaha R-MAX

CamperBob23• 6 years ago

"Twelve years of watching drone technology at CES emerge and then boom has made one thing abundantly clear: China Won. American companies have built a lot of cool science fair projects that get lots of media attention, but minimal real-world deployment – from light shows to food delivery. We also design a lot of interesting low-volume consumer drones, but most of them lean heavily on Chinese R&D and then go on to have their product manufactured in China. Yes, I know, I am fully aware I did the same thing years ago with Oculus."

He's not wrong. A few years ago, I spent $399 for a point-and-shoot digital camera that took decent photos under decent lighting conditions. It supported resolutions up to 1920x1080 or so. DJI just sold me a camera for the same price that takes better photos. Also, it takes videos. Also, it fucking flies. It can fly for over 20 minutes, shoot a 1080p or 2.7K video two miles away, and find its own way back home. Uncle, already.

In a completely-unrelated anecdote, some other people in China just sold me a 3 GHz vector network analyzer with performance and features comparable to a $10,000 portable VNA model from Keysight. It cost $70, batteries included. (And in an amusing bit of irony, its Chinese designer is currently upset because some other Chinese people used its CC-licensed design and GPL-licensed firmware to undercut her own Tindie offering.)

Not many people will find the second example very meaningful, but quite a few people can appreciate the first one. If you haven't played with a quad yet and your toy budget can accommodate $399 (really $499, because you want the 'Fly More' kit), consider setting aside a Saturday afternoon to goof around with a Mavic Mini. It'll change your perspective on the evolution of consumer-accessible technology and on your own neighborhood.

I can see why the Powers that Be in the US are pulling out all the stops to hose China by any means necessary. This is what it must have felt like to watch the rise of Japan in the 1970s, as they turned a reputation for being a bunch of half-assed copycats into a world-class engineering culture.

(It should go without saying that none of this is an attempt to justify any political, military, economic, or social actions on the part of China's government. But it won't, so there, it's said.)

kalium-xyz• 6 years ago

3DR is american and makes DJI their gymbals.

China made the best drones, now Anduril does

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