Consumer drones have reached the point of insane use cases that I dont think a lot ever believed possible.
They are being used in the Ukraine/Russia conflict atm by each side for spotting and dropping grenades and mortar shells. They are doing it by rigging them up with cheap aftermarket parts and then rigging the AUX light on/off to trigger the drop.
They are also being used in other conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar.
They quite literally have changed warfare because they are so affordable.
Really interesting overall. Will be interesting to see this all morphs into.
Be prepared for your interest to taper. I expect the anti- or counter- drone technology is a little more expensive, but it exists, a lot, so drone warfare has technically been stalemated already. I think this is a good thing, leaving most of the interesting bits in earnest ethical discussion.
A microwave hacked to work with the doors open will disable most of the commercially available drones. 800W of transmission at 2.4 GHz is tough to speak through.
Of course, this way is quite dangerous, and violates radio frequency regulations, but if it's a war, who cares.
I would assume that unless you are able to deliver enough power to damage the receiver (and remember it goes down fast, r^2, plus transmitter is on the side of the microwave, standing wave perpendicular to the door), it wouldn't really impact transmission. It's not AM radio and you are not even outputting noise with timing comparable to transmission, just adding constant (or maybe 50hz sine).
Plus there are multiple channels at 2.4Ghz, and you are probably outputting a narrow single freq.
But that's just me guessing, I'd love to know if it would actually work.
It slightly changes frequency randomly on every zero crossing of the input frequency, so 100Hz FSK modulation effectively. It is enough to slow down your bluetooth and wifi when the door is closed and the radiated power is fully legal (<0.1W IIRC), so the effect should be amplified a lot when the door is open. Long distance flight is already getting close to the limits of what signal integrity you can get, so even a few miliwatts at the drone might be enough to disable the communications with it.
I too would really like to know, and try it too, but getting permission for 800W transmission would be a pain.
In the us the regulations say "minimum power required" but no more than 1W eirp, which means the radio can be less than a watt with a directional antenna.
Good 802.11 radios can do 1000mW.
A microwave oven magnetron and a simple aluminum waveguide is many hundreds or thousands of times more effective radiated power.
Can't you go around that if you have direct line of sight to the drone, with some laser or very targeted radio? Or perhaps a relay drone. Also I assume the drones will increasingly become autonomous.
Lazer? Sure, if you can aim it that well. Highly targeted radio? A bit doubtful, at least not without increased transmission power.
For what it's worth, this attack can be sidestepped fairly easily just by not using open frequencies, to which microwave ovens are usually tuned(for regulatory reasons). This is only useful against drones that are available to buy for individuals, as they are forced to use the same open frequencies. Anything military grade is likely using other frequencies, and you can't use cheap microwave ovens to generate ridiculous amounts of them.
Proximity fuzes are a thing, and you've got a target that doesn't have the torque to deal with random strands of carbon fiber thrown into it propellers, it should be a fairly simple matter to make a shell that is almost nerf safe, but deadly to drones.
The issue is collateral damage. Using a flak gun to take out a drone flying 20 ft over a crowds head at 120mph is going to probably do far more damage than the drone would.
It was in the context of war zone but it's not a massive stretch of the imagination that sooner or later some terrorist movement will start using them. In fact I am surprised they haven't already.
My armchair theory is that anyone smart enough to inflict horrifying damage on society is able to find a comfortable niche for themselves within it, with a very few rare exceptions. Maybe the FBI and other agencies are more effective than we give them credit for, too, and can crack down quickly on groups with a central mastermind and expendable minions carrying out attacks
I came to a similar conclusion while standing in security queues at airports. There are heaps of easy ways to do dastardly airliner-related things but the people with the capacity are too nice to actually do anything like that and are all too busy anyway.
Assassinating public officials with drones has become a fashion. Just not in the US (yet). If you don’t think it’s on the US Secret Service’s radar though, you’re not paying attention.
A common tactic in Syria for years is literally putting a couple lbs of explosives on a consumer drone and kamikaze’ng it into a target.
Where would the most predictable time be for going after an official? At a large event they are supposed to be at.
Well, if proximity detonation is an issue, there's always weapons like CIWS [1] and C-RAM [2]. I imagine there could easily be some kind of adaption made for specialized ammo. Instead of typical bullets, use some kind of very low grade concussive. The explosive wouldn't necessarily need to be an explosive, but merely just something to disrupt the air around one or two blades of the drone to force it into an unrecoverable spin.
Similar to small grade concussives, I've heard some interesting defense systems use a projectile that has a kind of "mini parachute" to overwhelm target acquisition systems. I can't recall what it was in relation to. Chaff, maybe? The point is, if you could get enough small objects floating in the area, you could make it much harder for an enemy drone to maneuver within a specific area.
Honestly, I think the soon-to-be hurdle would be around implementing a good jamming system against automated defenses, which would probably lead to inventing some sort of miniaturized version of current fighter planes, but built in such a way that doesn't need to account for things like G tolerance for pilots.
None of those is going to be a good idea using in a stadium, above a crowd, with buildings in the background (less than 100 yards away), etc. which are the big threat areas.
Drones that can carry a couple pounds or more of C4 (which is a lot) can fly literally 10 ft above roof tops and crowds at 100+ mph while zig zagging through buildings and alleyways - fully autonomously.
This isn’t theory, there are live demonstrations on YouTube.
Zigzagging through a forest fully autonomously (with no GPS) - there are videos on YouTube of a Swiss company doing similar. [https://youtu.be/m89bNn6RFoQ]
Folks have been using those and similar (cheaper) drones to drop Grenades on tanks in Ukraine.
As the autonomous flight is harder with smaller drones (less computing payload available, worse sensors), the only reason you’re not seeing both of these parts together in urban environment is the implication (for national security). It is there.
Here's the video of that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr7L2t-svJQ&t=16s - that's below 5mph and carrying an external payload of 0 grams, and the reason it's in a forest is because you can't fit them all in an alleyway and you need multiple in order for them to work.
>> Here is a YouTube video of a demonstration with a hexcopter
At 22mph, the claim was 100mph+
>> And here is a dude flying a DJI Inspire
At around 20 mph max but mostly hovering and for 8 minutes at that before running out of juice
>> Folks have been using those
No. People like yourself can easily dream this concept. It stands to reason, why wouldn't it be possible? The truth is that battery technology is no where near good enough yet.
It's the first idea tried in Syria, it's been tried thousands of times at this point and yet we have more documented cases of the aggressors killing or injuring themselves than of the 3 documented cases where this actually worked in practice - all 3 of which i think everyone can agree from the footage are pure fluke. Zero aiming was possible, it was just release and hope for the best in all 3 cases.
What people are actually using them for is for recon and aiming of artillery. They're effective in these roles and that's why they're used for this rather than strapping heavy explosives to them.
>> autonomous flight is harder with smaller drones (less computing payload available
That's not true. Compute isn't a restriction in small drone autonomy. A basic F4 is wayyyyy overkill for flight stability and control. Waypoint navigation is even lower power requirements since it amounts to a simple loop not much more complex than:
1. Get current GPS coordinates
2. Get current compass heading
3. Send directional input via serial peripheral to F3 or F4 flight controller
4. Repeat
The flight controller is doing far more processing than this - gyro input & smoothing for each of 3 axes, accelerometer (same), GPS location at approx 10Hz, optionally barometric input (rare and usually not necessary). These inputs are often processed through kalmann filter before finally calculating the torque command to issue to each ESC's microcontroller. This only happens at up to a few hundred Hz so you can see compute power is not a restriction.
In larger aircraft it's harder because you can't beat physics, in a small drone i can change the amount of torque applied to a propeller 4+ times per rotation in toy off the shelf drone tech today. With larger craft that have non-electric motors this is simply not possible. You can't instruct a mechanical engine to regulate its power output with the same fidelity of an electric motor.
>> worse sensors
The only required input sensor is a gyro - in practice we use accelerometers and GPS in autonomous drones but there are ways of avoiding the need for these (e.g. visual inputs / optical flow as a correction for drift). MEMS gyros are cheap and effective, what better sensors do you need?
Your reasoning is uninformed / dreamed up based on watching too many movies and not being familiar with the actual discipline.
Better algorithms are a restriction. The science / theory part of implementation was achieved by all projects fairly quickly (ardupilot, clean/betaflight, etc. etc.) - but the art part, the how it feels and performs in practice, is an unsolved problem under continual development.
>> drop Grenades
Too heavy given current battery technology and lack of aiming. These are not effective weapons which is why they have limited success. More people have been killed in war zones in the past decade by garden spades than toy / photo drones with explosives.
TL;DR until batteries technology moves forward by a few generations, the concept of a small drone as an offensive weapon will not be better than that offered by something like the switchblade drone. Which when you cut through the excitment, is less valuable than conventional weaponry in most fight scenarios.
Compute is not a limiting factor in a small drone for basic flight operations, it is a limiting factor for real-time optical guidance (aka in GPS denied areas and real-time object/target recognition). Which is exactly what I was referring to.
Those examples yes are not showing 100mph. I’m afraid the video I’m referring to has been pulled, and the in-person demonstrations I’ve been asked to not talk about or publicize (now that I follow up with the parties involved).
The battery technology is more
than sufficient for what I’m describing. My M300RTK has no issues carrying 5+ lbs for 15 minutes or 1-2 lbs for 40 minutes, which is more than sufficient, and scale is more than adequate here.
You’re a couple years behind on this assessment. I literally have a 10 lb ‘hunter killer’ autonomous anti-drone drone from a company I’m not going to name sitting a few desks away from me right now.
>> I’m afraid the video I’m referring to has been pulled, and the in-person demonstrations I’ve been asked to not talk about or publicize
Interesting.
Let's take a second to take this from back of a fag packet physics.
To produce a 100mph drone is easy - lets take one of mine (there's nothing special about it) as a starting point and then lets see what we can change to achieve load carrying while retaining this speed.
Each motor & prop combo produces 1.5kg of thrust. They do this while drawing 40amps each from a 6s - which they can sustain for up to around 10 seconds before burning out MOSFETs on the ESCs (not to mention deforming the battery plug due to 160amps passing through a 60amp connector). This craft has a weight of just under 350 grams and when coupled with an 1800mah 6s, has an all up weight just under 650 grams.
We want to carry "several pounds" - lets make it easy, lets say 2lbs - and retain that 100mph speed.
Adding 10 grams prevents us hitting 100mph, we need to scale up our thrust. First problem - there's no other prop pitch or blade count for this motor size which will increase thrust while retaining prop speed, so we need to move up a size in motor. Since we need to carry 2lbs, you might think we only need each motor / prop combo to produce at an extra 0.5lbs but in practice we're going to need more than this because we need to sustain the aircraft vertically, whilst also providing enough thrust horizontally to reach the target speed, so in practice we will need more than an extra 8lbs of thrust (remember how 6kgs of thrust is needed to carry a 650g craft to 100mph - you don't just get to add 2lbs of thrust and call it done).
Problem - we need a motor / prop combo that produces above 2.5kg thrust each - so we're into 14 inch propellers and we need a motor heavy enough to take around 60amps at 6s (i'm being conservative to try and make the maths work out in your favour but i hope we can both agree that only 60amps is pure fantasy here).
That's a new problem, our weight went up and so we need even more thrust to compensate.
That's another new problem, we have more thrust but now we need a power supply capable of a higher discharge rate - that kind of battery entails even more weight.
But now there's a new problem, our larger props mean we're well away from the happy 300-400mph tip speed and now we're approaching the speed of sound - which of course means we can't fly.
But now there's a new problem, the battery that can supply that discharge does exist, the only problem is it weighs almost 2kg by itself.
And so we're back to you can't fly 2lbs payload at 100mph on today's battery tech.
Camera operators have been trying hard for years at this point to put a RED or some other expensive heavy camera / lens combo right next to race cars on track. There are two solutions for that today: 1 - fly the heavy lens and get that sweet image but do it at 20mph or 2 - keep up with the 100mph+ action but film it on a gopro or similar.
You're totally right, I have no idea what I'm talking about!
Some random babble:
I'm glad you're running 6S at least. I was worried you were running something like a 2S rig.
Is your your assertion is no one can build a quadcopter style drone that can go 100mph and carrying a 2lb payload?
Or that you can't add 2lbs to your 6 inch racing style quad and go 100mph without changing something design wise?
Because the first has a number of commercial products (albeit using hybrid powertrains due to longer desired range [https://soninhybrid.com/], [https://dronedj.com/2022/01/04/firefly-really-heavy-lift-dro...]). They'd have no issues doing the same thing over shorter distance, but folks wouldn't buy them - because for the commercial use cases, speed is only useful when it means covering more distance (and is therefore is really speed + distance). Tweaking some variables and changing some thinking would get you something from DJI that would have no issues, but it wouldn't sell, at least to the typical commercial or recreational market.
I would be VERY surprised if DJI didn't already have a healthy set of military contracts for doing exactly this, but if so, it isn't anything public.
The second yeah, should hopefully be obvious. It isn't THAT far off though, as you'll see below.
For the situation I'm mentioning, there are different tradeoffs, and I'm doing the best I can without causing problems re: confidential details:
You're getting confused on amperage, because peak amperage output is a matter of parallelizing batteries and design of the cell, and is NOT battery chemistry limitations (per-se). You can double your peak available amperage by changing the way your battery is wired. It doesn't add weight. It does halve capacity however, but that is range, not peak power.
Thermal management is one of the bigger issues in practice, and higher voltages tend to help a lot there (less resistance in wiring for a given amount of power delivered). It also results in less weight.
If you had a 40 amp peak 6S pack (which is only ~ 800 watts peak), you'd get the same per-pack equivalent draw with 3x in parallel (120amp total is 40 amp per pack) or 2.6kw. But frankly, 12S (or higher voltage) is better in every way but expense/parts availability if you're handy with electronics. A 12S 40A pack delivers 3x the actual power for the same wiring, assuming components are insulated/rated for the voltage.
And yeah, I know 'peak amps' numbers on most batteries are a lie, first thing I do when I do a build is instrument power flow, including amperage under load.
ESCs/motor controllers would likely be your primary sourcing difficulty, but you can get COTS 120 Amp individual motor ESCs [https://www.getfpv.com/electronics/electronic-speed-controll...] inexpensively if you're running 6S, and not too crazy expensive if you're running 12S like that particular one is designed for. That one also already has BLHeli_32, but most of them can be re-flashed, and then every COTS flight controller can deal with them pretty easily. That particular ESC is rated for controlling 32kw PER MOTOR, by the way. You could use a 4 in 1, but as you note, meh on total power rating. They are compact. They also have thermal management issues. Individual ESCs can get out into the airstream easier, and if you fry one it's less work to replace.
Motors with the desired design criteria would be next, sourcing difficulty wise, but that would depend on specific propeller/fan design. There are a LOT of options, and winding your own actually isn't THAT hard (or re-winding a COTS one for different characteristics).
Most likely anyone who is doing what I describe at a state actor level is going to be doing their own ESC design, and ESC + flight control firmware anyway, and the electronics to make a compact ESC for arbitrary amperage/voltages are very well understood. They're used in everything from elevator motors, to milling machines, to handtools. If it's someone doing a military style contract, they'll of course do their own battery packs, nominally to maximize their performance envelope for whatever mission they're trying to get the gov't to cough up cash for, but also because COTS will make them look less awesome.
But it's easy to rewire COTS packs to do pretty much whatever you want tradeoff wise, re: voltage, amperage, etc. Lithium batteries are amazing for their ability to handle very high peak power draw, and in the scenario that I'm describing, the bottleneck would likely be thermals, not chemistry or weight, and considering the time window being discussed, there are lightweight and interesting ways of handling that.
100 mph == 1.6 miles per minute after all, and it's highly unlikely the drone would be anything but hot gas and rapidly disassembled small parts after that amount of time.
You're getting confused on props and tip speed, because you aren't thinking of, or aren't aware of, ducted fans which specifically solve this problem by giving you much higher thrust at the cost of a little (or a lot, depending on the frame design) extra weight. A little less than double, depending on conditions.
Prop pitch and design would look weird, comparatively, depending on the mission, from what you're used to seeing, and depending on the specific numbers, elements like blade count, leading and trailing edge, chord length, etc. tend to differ.
High agility has different airflow and stall characteristics than maximum speed and/or maximum weight and propellers designed for one tend to be not great for the other.
That said, there are a number of aerospace engineers quite familiar with the problem, and it's well solved at this point, up to ~ 160ish mph. And by well solved, I mean Embry-Riddle has it in their basic curricula, and there are a LOT of graduates rattling around. They're pretty smart too, in my experience, and are itching for problems like this to solve. Especially if you are ok with things exploding until they get it right.
After that it requires more complex solutions (usually involving a degree of direct jet propulsion) and some amount of fire.
Alright, I'm done. Anything more and I'm going to get in trouble.
Flak shells are designed to explode into a hail of steel fragments, in order to damage the target. Naturally a rain of steel from the sky is not good if you are standing below.
Allegedly at Pearl Harbour 63 American civilians were killed by anti-aircraft shells falling on them and 34 wounded.
Yup, and the smallest typical flak shell is going to necessarily have a pretty large lethal radius as that is what would get the drone.
It takes a lot less than that to blind everyone in the crowd with shrapnel or kill them, if you’re trying to shoot down the drone flying 20 ft over their heads.
The smaller the kill radius, the more difficult the intercept (fundamentally) - and that’s assuming there is a safe backdrop for any non-exploded shells.
These scenarios are much different than point defense at sea of a warship, or defense of the skies over a military base or city surrounded by mostly empty desert.
Their point I think is that drones can operate outside of the safe operation envelope of a flak canon. I don't think flak canons would be a good anti-drone defense except in really specific scenarios, and drone operators would then just not fly those scenarios.
The problem is that the counter drone technology, if it is a drone itself, will necessarily always be more expensive than the attack drone (because it must follow the attack drone). In that case it becomes a lopsided war of attrition.
I don't know anything about anything, so take with a large grain of salt.
drones work because of their elegant control mechanisms. Those require a nice clean radio environment. I suspect, but I do not know, a big spark would mess with the video stream coming from the drone, and probably the real time controls going to the drone. So, like, an arc welder or Tesla coil sparking continuously would do unpleasant things to the drone - no remote control.
You could, of course, make the drone smarter, use AI to detect targets. but that would hurt performance, and make the drone more expensive. I'd point to Iran faking gps signals to ground the us drone, like a while ago.
It's a bunch of tradeoffs. Preprogrammed doesn't have versatility, but is cheap. Dynamic is versatile, but expensive. Remote control is vulnerable to other stuff.
Sparks are easy to filter out. There are complex jamming and anti-jamming measures. Civilian drones aren't designed for this so they are easy to shut down, military drones are getting better at this quickly. Before the war in Ukraine people said russian electronic warfare systems and air defence will make drones useless. There were different phases in this war, at first Russians weren't even doing air defense so Bayraktars were destroying airdefense systems (which is crazy :) ). Now that Russians fixed that issue - Bayraktars aren't doing much damage from what we can see, but the artillery guidance drones are still doing OK. I've heard good things about WB Electronics Fly Eye drones for example. They have some capacity to survive in area where the radio communication is jammed.
Also - if you do jamming - it makes you a big target broadcasting "I'm HERE!". There are missiles that are designed to guide themselves towards jamming/radar stations like HARM.
So with combined arms you can:
- launch a decoy
- watch for radar/air defence/jamming stations
- launch HARM missiles to destroy them
- launch drones to guide artillery
- destroy undefended bases with cheap and accurate drone-adjusted artillery fire
Also - military drones are usually controlled differently from the civilians ones. It feels more like playing RTS (click on the target, wait for the drone to get there) instead of a flying simulator (control the engines constantly). So if you're jammed for 5 minutes while going from point A to point B - it doesn't matter.
Also military drones often use satellite communication which is much harder to disrupt than direct radio connection.
They don’t require a clean radio environment, and can (and have shown in field trials) excellent full autonomous modes. Still a generation or two out for typical consumer drones though.
I guess I don't understand what precision is needed when dropping a grenade. I've never had a grenade thrown at me. I sort of suspect, but have no first hand knowledge, that a half a second is a big deal. yes, the drone will go to the location and drop the grenade. But there's no opportunity for dynamic reaction for changing conditions. I think, but do not know, that a few feet are a big deal with small explosives. Well, I kinda know from bottle rockets and such, but they aren't that scary.
You can cover a lot of small errors with a bigger explosion. but that means more payload, and more expensive.
denying that elegant control of small explosive in a precise location seems like a winner. yeah, you can go to position X but maybe I'm a little to the left of that. of course it's not free, but me picking up my shit and moving 10 feet is pretty cheap. cheaper than a drone for sure.
Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe tensor flow says that's a person near the target, adjust location to drop the explosive on the person.
from the point of a know nothing observer, it sure seems like there is some wiggle room. I'm not convinced an inexpensive drone has the capacity to solve these problems. (but you could send like 36 and drop grenades in a 6x6 grid, but that seems expensive).
you're underestimating the control software. with consumer grade cameras and simple image processing, you can write "go to x, find the nearest person and drop on them". also, just having the camera in the air is enough to make it much easier to launch a rocket at a target for juicier targets.
Not just field trials, your average joe has been able to program waypoint missions for a long time. They generally require reliable GPS after take off, but I imagine rough intertial referential sensors would be enough for warfare. It's enough for commercial aviation.
Consumer grade IMUs drift into unacceptable garbage in about two minutes of flight without GPS corrections[0]. You would need visual odometry to work in GNSS-denied environments
>The problem is that the counter drone technology, if it is a drone itself, will necessarily always be more expensive than the attack drone (because it must follow the attack drone).
Same argument made against Israel's Iron Dome against Hamas's more or less crude rockets.
Said argument misses the point. The question isn't whether an Iron Dome missile is more expensive than a Hamas rocket (it is). It's whether an Iron Dome missile is more valuable than the lives and property lost by letting that Hamas rocket through.
Yes, but this works because Israel has access to vastly more money than Hamas does. So they can withstand a 10^X cost discrepancy. It would not work between two parties who are close to evenly matched financially.
Not necessarily. The hunter drone don't need to carry payload that the attack drone is supposedly carrying. Also it may not need the batteries for long range. It is kind of like bomber-fighter situation.
I think the hunter drones would be first to get autonomous operations. The cost of errors/bugs is less for them than say for a ground attack drone hitting your own tank or unrelated civilian truck.
One option is radio antennas in a gun shaped thing. And it just scales up from there. You can use very powerful antennas on the ground or in a plane to interfere with the control system or GPS.
Also known as a perfect beacon for an anti-radiation missile.
It's not quite "drones HATE this one weird trick". Yes, jamming is a thing, but so are FHSS, ARMs and any number of other countermeasure-counters. No GPS/GNSS/whatever? Inertial navigation systems. No comms at all? All kinds of flavors of automation.
Simple countermeasures may be effective against consumer drones, but the overall problem is an iterative metagame where flawless countermeasures are pretty rare and there's usually a way to adapt or fight back.
I meant that if you intend to use a jammer as a countermeasure against a drone, you're making yourself vulnerable to ARMs. Sure, you can position the jammer away from anything important but that ups your time to redeploy / reconfigure it, reducing its effectiveness. You also lose the jammer, though that might not necessarily be a problem if it's a lot cheaper than an ARM and you have a lot of them available.
But of course ARMs work fine against a drone's controller, too - assuming it isn't using FHSS, though that itself assumes no crazy-advanced anti-FHSS RDF. That's kind of my point regarding how this stuff cuts both ways, how even if a countermeasure works in one instance that's no guarantee it'll continue working, and how countermeasures themselves generally have weaknesses.
Naval engineering provides a lot of examples of this dynamic. Check out what the introduction and development of the torpedo did to the meta.
> They are doing it by rigging them up with cheap aftermarket parts and then rigging the AUX light on/off to trigger the drop.
I feel like this implies that they're using DJI/consumer drones. They aren't, those are too expensive and too slow. They use custom-built FPV drones, which are much faster, cheaper, and much easier to build from parts.
The phrase "rigging them up with aftermarket parts" doesn't really apply when the entire drone is "cheap aftermarket parts".
DJI drones while expensive they are rather user friendly. Some fighters in Ukraine do use them with aftermarket droppers[1]. Payload is limited to a single VOG-17M grenade. Dropper has a light sensor and is triggered by aux light.
They also build custom drones as well. For example there's R18 by Aerorozvidka[2]. Which is largeish octacopter from higher quality hobby parts. Payload is ~5kg which allows taking multiple anti-armor grenades or small mortar rounds.
Yup and if they are custom FPV builds then you get quite a lot of IO ports at your disposal. Plus the flight controller supports easy mapping to your transmitter so you just have to flick a switch.
“War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
They are being used in the Ukraine/Russia conflict atm by each side for spotting and dropping grenades and mortar shells. They are doing it by rigging them up with cheap aftermarket parts and then rigging the AUX light on/off to trigger the drop.
They are also being used in other conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar.
They quite literally have changed warfare because they are so affordable.
Really interesting overall. Will be interesting to see this all morphs into.