> The tech required for search and rescue is the same tech required for search and destroy.
That's a good thing. We're going to develop the search and destroy technology no matter what, so we might as well get something beneficial out of it along the way.
If the west don't develop autonomous killer robots, China, Russia, and others still will.
For all of our flaws I'd still rather that our military was on an even footing with theirs. And I can't see how autonomous killer robots won't simply be better at warfare than non-autonomous machines.
Many people are worrying about the implications. They made the video you linked to. This worry is widespread and is all over pop culture. The Terminator or Matrix movies for example. How regular people can influence weapon development is another problem altogether.
Having worked at Lockheed and seeing just how "Because profits, so FUCK YOU that's why" the defense industry works, I have little faith.
Further, what pisses me off, is how idealistic-yet-naive-and-downright-corruptible many very smart people can be.
Take for example the genius nerd who is empowered and elated at the acceptance and praise they might receive for being able to hack a system which ultimately results in the death of anonymous-to-them-other-human.
This happens in every culture.
Mental exploitation is just as insidious as sexual or physical exploitation.
This is where there is one fundamental thing lacking in all of technology, aside from Asimov: What are our first principles?
A freaking POST-BIOS requirement for any system might ultimately have to be a checkin with a prime-directive which tells it that regardless of whatever code you are running, you can't do XYZ.
We are all guilty of "wouldn't it be cool if" syndrome in tech.
What you can do in 'cool' video games, is not 100% mappable to meat-space.
> This is where there is one fundamental thing lacking in all of technology, aside from Asimov: What are our first principles?
What are you referring to? The Three Laws? AFAIR they exist in order to explore how dumb the idea of them is in the first place. Such high-level rules don't map to reality at all.
A ruleset correctly encompassing human moral values is a complex and hard problem. It's so hard that we haven't even figured out the proper formalisms for it, not to mention that while all humans seem to share some basic moral values, it gets very muddy in the details.
> The tech required for search and rescue is the same tech required for search and destroy.
Haha, no, no it's not. (I'm very active in SAR -- headed out to a large search this weekend, even.)
We've had "search and destroy" for a decade now, but SAR still doesn't have effective use of drones. Quadcopters can navigate tricky terrain close enough to the ground to see a sufficient amount of detail, but they only get about 25 minutes of flight time.
Fixed-wing drones can get much better flight time, but we can't put them anywhere near close enough to the ground to see the average missing person.
Typically the next thing people suggest is IR. Yeah, IR's great, there's just one problem: there are a lot of IR sources on the ground, even in the wilderness, and people with clothing on aren't that great a source of IR by comparison. At a recent multi-agency training event, I reviewed footage from a repurposed Reaper drone flown by the national guard after the southern California mudslides. Making out the difference between a person on the ground and a streetlamp was impossible.
The only documented drone find I've heard of so far was a person sitting in an orchard. Probably there have been others, but the point is: SAR is a wildly different situation than people imagine.
Helicopters and civil air patrol are superior to drones in almost every way. I've hung out the side of a UH-60 and a couple of Lakotas during exercises looking for brightly colored objects on the ground. At around 100 feet above ground level our success rate was around 60%.
Heck, we had a missing small aircraft, in the snow, a year and a half ago. There were hundreds of searchers on the ground, multiple CAP and helo overhead. Guess who found it? Some folks on snowmobiles a few weeks later.
We use a number called "POD" -- Probability of Detection -- in our reports after every assignment. It's an ass-pull guesstimate at what our odds were of locating a responsive subject, an unresponsive subject, or a clue during the assignment. High POD for a close grid search pattern on the ground in light forest for an unresponsive subject is about 70%. Average POD for an unresponsive subject by a fleet of quadcopters in the same environment would be like 5%. To effectively rule the area out, any decent search manager would deploy a ground team anyway.
So, in the first place, this MIT experiment -- while very cool -- still suffers from a lot of the same issues that this technology has in a SAR context. And in the second place, shooting down efforts to develop this technology for civilian use is silly because, well, I hate to break it to ya, but we've been killing people with (mostly autonomous) drones for a while now. That horse is already outta the barn.
looking for brightly colored objects on the ground. At around 100 feet above ground level our success rate was around 60%.
I've done SAR at sea and it is frightening how close you can be to who/what you are looking for and not see them/it because of the waves, or reflections, or low cloud/fog, or rain, and then there's the constant movement of everything due to currents and wind, the inaccuracy of GPS and shooting resections... And you can't just have guys out looking, there are only a small number of RIBs or other assets, and they have limited endurance, and the sea is very very big.
SAR is a hard, hard problem as you say. When I dive for fun now, I take an excessive amount of gear incase I ever need to be found.
How well would sound work? As in listening for the person to yell out to an autonomous vehicle flying above the canopy.
Obviously drones are noisy, so maybe fixed wing. Or maybe you could have a microphone suspended on a cable fifty feet below a quad, with an apparatus that shields noise from above. But there seem to be promising characteristics too for this situation: 1.) human voice is very different than propeller hum, 2.) wildernesses have very minimal background noise. Filter and classify outliers.
I say this as someone whose only SAR situation was getting himself out of the Vermont woods at dusk by hiking roughly a mile towards the sound of a barking dog.
People have discussed that. A flying thing that could be used to relay instructions to lost parties would be helpful in a few situations.
I think search organizations are certainly interested in UAVs, but at the moment nobody's sure how to use them effectively. It kinda strikes me as being like blockchain: cool technology, everybody wants to use it, but there aren't really that many real-world use cases where something else isn't just as good or better.
Probably the highest priority should be fixing their flight time. 25 minutes is just not enough time in the air to be useful, and fixed-wing is too tricky to navigate in too many kinds of terrain. If someone figures out how to start approaching 60 minutes in the air with a payload -- speaker & microphone, IR, comms -- that would probably start getting more attention.
Another thing that would be really cool is an airborne minicell. Just about everyone's carrying a smartphone now, they're just going into areas where there's no signal. If something could go out there offering signal, and report back when a device tries to connect to it, it wouldn't necessarily need to get close to the ground and that could really narrow down some of our searches.
You can't have a MAD scenario with drones. Drones are less like nuclear weapons, and more like AK-47s. If they're available, they'll be used, by states, guerillas, warlords and organized crime alike.
I think there is a big difference though between a nuclear weapon, which is very hard to procure unless you're a nation-state, and a programmable drone, which can be procured at Best Buy by anyone. Mutually Assured Destruction has kept nation-states in check in terms of nuclear weapons, yes. There is no such barrier to individuals purchasing drones, which have many purposes, unlike a nuclear weapon. There are many more crazy individuals in the world that can afford cheap drones than there are crazy nation-states willing to use their nuclear weapons against a foreign population. You can retaliate against a nation-state because it will be obvious who it was. Missiles are easily trackable and immediately detectable upon launch, unlike small hobby-sized drones.
Important thing is, you can't really do a MAD scenario with drones. MAD requires the destruction to be assured - e.g. once missiles are in the air, everyone's done. The destruction is immediate and can't be stopped by last-minute negotiations; there's no option of attacking "only a little" with nukes.
> The destruction is immediate and can't be stopped by last-minute negotiations; there's no option of attacking "only a little" with nukes.
Of course there is: you could attack only battlefield targets, or only strategic military targets, or only one of the enemy's cities. MAD requires two things: first, the technology for mass destruction, second, the geopolitical conditions where either side can credibly threaten complete annihilation if provoked. Nuclear weapons provide the first by themselves, but the second only incidentally: the nuclear powers have come to a credible mutual understanding that they won't use nukes in their various border skirmishes, and that any use of nukes represents an escalation which risks MAD.
World leaders could hypothetically come to the same understanding regarding drones: use them anywhere in the world and you will start a nuclear war.
> World leaders could hypothetically come to the same understanding regarding drones: use them anywhere in the world and you will start a nuclear war.
Yes, except for one big difference that I see: individuals can't go purchasing a nuke like they can a drone. So while the MAD concept works with nukes, because only nation states have them, the same isn't true for drones, where individuals can have an unlimited number, in addition to governments. World leaders can agree re: drones and attacking each other, but that won't stop an intent individual. I think people might be quite surprised what you can do with a consumer grade drone purchased for a few hundred bucks hooked up to lidar, multiple gps sources, swarm technology so they communicate with each other and object recognition. Now just rig up an explosive device, chemical weapons or a gun. You can even drop items (bombs), or pick items up using retractable claws. You can do an awful lot with a consumer/hobby-grade drone hooked up to some cheap sensors using something even as basic as an arduino with open-source software like ArduPilot, which is so advanced (and cool) even Nasa uses it.
> Morality has kept nuclear weapons in check (so far anyways)
Morality and logistics. The major nuclear powers have implemented a relatively successful program to make it very difficult for a non-nuclear power to develop nuclear weapons.
> I’m sure it will keep AI drones in check too.
There is simply no way to use logistics to curtail AI drones in the same manner as nuclear weapons; all that is needed to make a drone is a 3d printer, common industrial components and software.
Fortunately for an AI drone swarm to be as destructive as a decent sized nuke, you would need millions of them. Unfortunately an AI drone swarm can be less destructive than a nuke. It could kill all the people in a city but leave infrastructure completely intact for the attackers to use. This future is not here yet but is coming and it is good people are starting to talk about it.
Do you need that size of destruction to keep people from leaving their homes? Or just the fear that rogue autonomous drones are flying around with a .22 mag attached? Wouldn't there be some economic impact from such a scenario?
Maybe for some small period of time, but not for long. Americans, and I think people in general, can be quite adaptive. In Texas enough people would just start carrying around shotguns for the chance to be the one to shoot it out of the sky. In San Francisco, who knows, maybe some counter drone tech would be quickly developed. A large society can absorb hundreds of deaths a day without too many problems if it knows the problem is not going to escalate exponentially.
Perhaps you are right. Texas certainly would adapt rather quick.
That said, some cities are already so messed up, that cops won't respond to 911 calls in some areas. I would expect that to get worse should there ever be "thugs with drones".
> all that is needed to make a drone is a 3d printer, common industrial components and software.
This could only happen in a very distant future. As it stands, firing a gun from a 3D printed drone would make it fall out of the sky. Even if it didn’t, it would be laughably inaccurate. Even still, they could be easily defeated with a birdshot.
The bar to entry for nukes is a bit higher than drones. There are already a myriad of drone hobbyists that do very impressive things at very impressive long ranges. RasPi's are getting cheaper and more powerful. I can imagine street gangs renting drones from geeks for all manor of news worthy events.
[Edit] Did I just create a DarkWeb business model?
The video assumes that the most important and most difficult part of a SAR drone's job - object detection - will simply be solved at some point in the future.
I am a SAR volunteer, and our team has used drones on real searches. What I can tell you is that the problem is not navigation (even through forested areas), but object detection. Even for a human being, detecting humans (responsive or unresponsive) or signs of human presence (trash, abandoned camps, etc) from drone camera footage is extremely difficult.
Autonomous flying drone navigation is hard but identifying signs of human presence from onboard sensor information will be much, much harder.
There is a contest run in Australia called the "UAV Outback rescue" https://uavchallenge.org/ It's run by Australia's peak scientific body, the CSIRO so the results are pretty rigorous.
The scenario is Joe is lost and incapacitated in the Australian bush. "Joe" is a human sized dummy with a (very) small infra red source under his clothing. He needs to be found and then have something done. He is located within an area of about 50 sq km.
The requirement has always been the aircraft must be totally autonomous from take-off through to landing - and that includes finding Joe. In the previous challenge, once Joe was fond the aircraft had to land beside him, and take off again - in an area it had never seen before.
About 6 years ago Andrew Tridgell (original author of Samba and Rsync) joined Canberra UAV (an amateur group of UAV enthusiasts), and started working on the Ardupilot AUV software Canberra UAV used in future attempts at the competition. At the time nobody had completed the challenge. After Andrew joined Canberra UAV, Canberra UAV completed the challenge every time (and indeed until 2018 was the only team to complete it) forcing the CSIRO to up the difficulty for the next competition to be held.
The location algorithm has been pretty simple in all cases - this is a group of amateurs who could not use expensive LIDAR's. From memory it's multi pass. The first pass happens from relatively high, and then promising signatures (which are barely more than a pixel) and then investigated more closely.
On a related note, sea search & rescue still primarily relies on spotters looking out the windows trying to see something.
Seems like a place where pattern recognition could be an asset, even if it just supplements rather than replaces a spotter. Or heck, send a Google Maps-style image to land, and let volunteers flag points of interest.
There's a couple of different services that are taking a "Mechanical Turk" approach to this problem right now. Probably the largest is Tomnod, which has had volunteers classify objects in satellite images for both SAR and humanitarian tasks: https://www.tomnod.com/
Lots of drone people, so I’ll drop my off topic drone question: why isn’t gasoline more popular in the drone world? Isn’t the energy to weight ratio like 100x compared to LiPo?
Several teams, including the winning one in previous years, used gasoline for the UAV Outback Challenge, an annual UAV search-and-rescue competition: https://uavchallenge.org/
Not necessarily a drone person but I assume it's because a gas engine would have more moving parts hence more size and weight. There are drones running on gas but they're huge, not to mention loud.
I don't follow why the drones need to go below the canopy at all. Just use an infrared camera! This is already being done in our local area for SAR, though with remote controlled drones rather than autonomous[0], and it's worked. I also worked on a undergrad research project involving autonomously deployed drones that identified cattle with infrared and the results were a no-brainer compared to conventional cameras[1], even though this was quite a few years ago and both autonomous navigation and infrared options have gotten much much better since then.
There's the problem of false positives for sure (e.g. deer), but it gives you more than enough starting points.
This research sounds genuinely really fascinating, and I think they are making huge progress on a difficult problem (specifically, navigating unknown 3D space). I'm just not sure that this use case is the most important one.
I'd love to hear more about cases in which IR has made a difference in a search, because that hasn't been my experience or what I've heard about it.
And I'm calling BS on IR being able to see footprints under fresh snow, unless that fresh snow is a light dusting about 1 cm thick -- which just about any tracker could follow anyway.
IR requires a steep difference in thermal gradients between the subject and the environment. In cold environments, subjects tend to wear insulating clothing (and if they've shed that, then they've gone into the paradoxical undressing stage of hypothermia, and unfortunately they're done for). The cold environment also acts as a massive heat sink, quickly masking any heat signatures.
Warm environments suffer from reflectivity. Rocks bake in the sunlight and then re-emit that radiation all night long.
There are some environments where IR might help, but many more where it doesn't.
I don't know much personally about SAR applications. But in terms of the projects I've done, the temperature and size of the target is fairly predictable compared to noise in the image. While it's not as easy as "filter anything above this temperature as a positive", it's an easier engineering program than 3D navigation.
> I'd love to hear more about cases in which IR has made a difference in a search, because that hasn't been my experience or what I've heard about it.
While looking more into this though, they mentioned that one of the things the program found is that the drones are not good at seeing through tree canopies. This is surprising for me, and I suppose answers my question about why this MIT project has some benefit! I stand corrected in that regard.
> There are some environments where IR might help, but many more where it doesn't.
Absolutely. There's no magic solution for finding people. The project here is going to have pros and cons too, you need experienced people to know what tool makes sense where.
> *...one of the things the program found is that the drones are not good at seeing through tree canopies. This is surprising for me...
Yeah, if you dig around a bit you can find infrared and near-infrared images of trees and forests, and overhead IR shots of forest canopies. Trees give off a surprising amount of IR.
Several have commented on the likelihood that this will not be so much "Search & Rescue" as "Search & Destroy".
It seems that the "no GPS required" spec and the under-the-canopy flying and mapping they showed makes this considerably more likely.
Small drones on rescue missions need to find the lost person, identify their location and transmit it back. The search/find part would be best done above the canopy with appropriate sensors, covering as much ground as quickly as possible. Flying under the canopy, and mapping it the whole way would dramatically slow this process -- probably quicker to have a human horde search on foot.
Once found, the GPS coordinates would be the most essential data point to transmit back to the rescuers. The relative positions of all the local trees would be kind of irrelevant, but that could be quite useful in targeting various kinds of attack.
IOW, it seems the other Search & Destroy comments have got it right.
I would think that IR sensors would be a natural choice,
more for ‘lost child’ or ‘injured hiker’ than for
the simpler ‘lost hiker’ scenario. One of the SAR
challenges for lost children is that they might too
frightened to leap up and wave their arms at searchers,
either human or robotic. Calling a lost child by name helps,
but IR seems like a natural choice - is there a weight,
battery, or cost downside?
Eh, the bigger problem with lost children is their habit of hiding or wandering back into cleared areas. Fortunately, they don't tend to wander far. Lost Person Behavior guidebook puts a 4-6 year old child at a 95% range of 5.1 miles in dry territory. That doesn't change dramatically until you start approaching teenage ages.
I've posted a few criticisms of IR already in this thread. There are a narrow range of environments where it's helpful, and there's a tradeoff between image quality and flight time -- you can have good flight time and terrible image quality, or good image quality and terrible flight time.
I will thank you very kindly to take your loud battery powered flying fire-starters out of federal wilderness areas, thanks. SAR is hard enough as it is.
Also, and this may sound just totally perverse, when i go into a wilderness area I really do want to be alone and out of range of the world.
These drones can have any sensor you want. IR, motion detection, radio signals, you name it. Hiding from AI equipped with the right sensors is very hard. The only advantage you have is that you can hear them coming. For now anyway.
Hikers typically wear the exact opposite of camouflage.
Edit: really? Downvotes? Hiker gear is half neon colors and colored in reflective tabs. Easy visibility for SAR purposes is a design criteria for most hiking gear.
Hunter’s orange is pretty damn bright by design. I would also argue that hunter != hiker.
I’ve never noticed a correlation between photographers and clothing colors. I tend not to be in my own photos, so it’s not something I select gear based on.
Obviously not every bag is bright, although my wife’s bag is a nice metallic teal, but every hiking bag I’ve ever seen has reflector tabs built in. Ditto with our tent and rain flies, and quite a few of our tops. They help in a SAR situation, and improve safety if you ever need to come close to a road at night.
Taste is subjective, but outdoor gear trends towards the bright for safety reasons.
I have never seen a hiker wear camo, all of them have reflector tabs, and a large percentage have tops, bags, and hats in bright colors. And that’s not even getting into inclement weather gear, which trends towards the super garish. There’s a reason why Everest has a “rainbow valley”, and it’s not because heavy coats are designed to be subtle.
To bolster your point, even if my clothes are drab, I probably have a brightly colored buff or bandana on me intentionally if only to be easier to spot through the woods by fellow hikers. Likewise a fair bit of my gear is in flavors of "rescue orange".
I pointed out that hunting isn’t hiking (opinion, but they do have different names), and that regardless hunters regularly wear gear that is anti-camouflage by design, making any distinction there moot.
I then proceeded to point out that hiking gear has reflective tabs and bright colors for similar reasons. The more extreme the gear, the more intense the visibility features on average.
I then made an observation about what I’ve seen.
At no point did I say that any of those groups aren’t “real” hikers. Therefore, not a true Scotsman argument.
We seem to be running headfirst into the autonomous killer bot future without giving so much as a second look at the implications.
Slaughterbots [0] is a pretty good look at what can be achieved by refining and integrating technologies which all exist today.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA