I’ve enjoyed Mark Rober’s videos for a while now. They are fun, touch on accessible topics, and have decent production value. But this recent video isn’t sitting right with me
The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU
In it, he talks about a few techniques for how to take down “bad guy drones”, the problems with each, and then shows off the drone tech by Anduril as a solution.
Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
In the video, the Anduril product is a heavy drone that uses kinetic energy to destroy other drones (by flying into them). Quoting the person in the video:
imagine a children’s bowling ball thrown at twice as fast as a major league baseball fastball, that’s what it’s like getting hit by Anvil
This technology is scary for obvious reasons, especially in the wrong hands. What I also don’t like is how Mark Rober’s content is aimed at children, and this video includes a large segment advertising the children’s products he is selling. Despite that, he is promoting military technology with serious ethical implications.
There’s even a section in the video where they show off the Roadrunner, compare it against the patriot missiles, and loosely tie it in to defending against drones. While the Anvil could be used to hurt people, at least it is designed for small flying drones. The Roadrunner is not:
The Roadrunner is a 6 ft (1.8 m)-long twin turbojet-powered delta-winged craft capable of high subsonic speeds and extreme maneuverability. Company officials describe it as somewhere between an autonomous drone and a reusable missile. The basic version can be fitted with modular payloads such as intelligence and reconnaissance sensors. The Roadrunner-M has an explosive warhead to intercept UAS, cruise missiles, and manned aircraft.
These other people are pulling ya, the answer is yes, you can shoot them down, we have a full sport for it called skeet shooting. A drone can’t pivot out of the way in the 0.1 seconds it takes for you to pull the trigger and for the bird shot to travel and take it out. The biggest problem is the range of the gun (which isn’t that bad) and spotting the drone beforehand. The noise a drone of that size makes is not that much consider it could be like 40 or 50 feet up in the dead of night with no lights, buzz past you, drop a grenade down, kablooie. If the drone backs off or otherwise pivots to try to avoid getting shot, it probably couldn’t do what it was there to do anyways.
Obviously, a big array of military industrial camera technology running in a big fence is going to be able to spot the drone pretty quick, but the video doesn’t focus on the tech there because presumably that’d be too interesting and probably the company would not like that.