Fiber Optic Drone Control Beats Any RF Jammer

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.

Knowing a little bit about this, a 12km spool of 0.125mm plastic fibre costs about $1k [0]. Limits the range still (especially if the fibre is jacketed/supported in anyway).

They'll be back to barrage balloons next [1].

[0] https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-detail.php?id=3630&sum=1...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon

The anti tank guided missile designers of 50+ years ago would find this rather obvious.

I'm familiar with a number of methods that are being used in Ukraine, and the ones that drone operators seem to be most keen on is autonomous targeting. Basically, using computer vision and other sensor networks to identify and subsequently target a threat (usually in a cordoned off zone). Unfortunately the cameras, sensors, and compute hardware is expensive enough that they're trying to preserve the drone by using droppable ordnance, which is a lot harder to hit accurately. And the prices essentially mean they only get used to take out jammers, with normal FPV drones being used otherwise.

They do rely on drones being able to switch between autonomous modes upon detection of jamming attempts, which seems easy enough to do (though I know nothing about the techniques). My thought was if the detection of jamming attempts is easy enough, shouldn't it be just as easy to use RF direction finding and a fairly simple greedy seeker algorithm to find and destroy the jammer?

Why put the spool on the drone? I'd think you'd put it at the base station, and maybe have a way to cut the fiber on the drone so you can pull all the fiber back to the base station. Ah, but maybe that makes it easy to find the base station, but unless the drone can be autonomous after some point and take the fiber with it far from the base station, I'm not sure the base station's location can really be protected.

EDIT: Ah, the real reason the spool has to be on the drone must be that the drone can't pull the fiber through snags, and if the spool is on the drone then it doesn't have to.

Yeah, these are called tethered drones. They've been around for decades and have their own use cases, especially on moving vehicles or boats. There's nothing new about them.

Beyond the limitations mentioned in the article (shortish range, reduced payload capacity), these drones also leave behind a trail pointing directly at wherever they were launched from.

I hate that robot warfare continues to advance as if scifi hasn't been warning of the dangers to humanity forever. Everybody is just full ahead as if it'll all workout fine. I consider it one of Obama's major failures, USA was a few years ahead in drone tech so Obama went trigger happy blowing up "terrorists" all over the middle east instead of putting together a UN coalition to come up with a weapons treaty to slow down the spread. The short-term war is always seen as the top priority instead of the long term consequences. I'm still amazed at the gift to humanity that was the coalition building and foresight of the post-ww2 years during which these kind of things were possible, and which we currently seem determined to squander.

I’m amused picturing soldiers following the fiber back to the drone operator. But I suppose either their location is no real secret, it’s easy to defend and/or the other end has a radio transceiver far enough away from jamming and giving them a few more km of buffer.

I wonder if you could make a combo with power delivery and signal via a wire+fibre spool — eliminating the battery. Then have intermediate drones holding up the strand to extend the range…

Related:

Inside The 'Magic Radio' Protecting Russian Drones from Jamming (2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735138

What's the cost of a 10 mile fiber optic cable, relative to the RF drone jammer it defeats, or the $5K drone it defends?

I found it interesting there was no mention of submarine torpedo control by wire in the article.

I've been thinking a lot about this setup, and it seems it's a major advantage if you can pull it off:

- The drone can send HD video with no interruptions through the fiber, shifting all the AI calculations to the backend, and you don't have to sacrifice your GPUs that you would otherwise add to the drone.

- The fiber drone can act as a radio relay, so you can have many other radio drones connected to it, making jamming much harder and also you can use it as a relay for ground forces as well.

- The fiber can potentially be replaced or augmented with copper, and you can then replace the battery with a transformer, and keep sending electricity from the base station. Such tethered drones already exist and can fly for hours, but maybe they have not been used in war before.

Would an 'explosively pumped flux compression generator' disrupt electronics within a drone?

Also do many drones use GPS / dead-reckoning and follow pre-guided paths, to avoid need for comms.

Came across - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fgcxDRti5s recently which uses an array of IMUs and filtering, to they claim get accuracy similar to a fibre optic gyro.

I'm surprised how few people are pointing out that you can simply trace the wire back to the control station. At roughly 1 km of actual range, that's not just mortar range, that's fucking grenade launcher range.

Long distance fiber guidance is not a new concept. Most proximate example I can call to mind are the American TOW and Israeli Spike which have fiber guided variants/control options.

Beam riding is also a thing. The missile is guided by a sensor in its butt, therefore making it harder to jam.

fiberoptic drone control and feedback surveillance during initial phase of engagement

such ordinance, would provide telemetry and situational intelligence resources while transiting the first kilometers of range, thus the ordinance is munition and reconaisance device.

What if deploy some high altitude balloons as base stations.

probably better done with lasercomms

Is it only control or also power?

I mean... why wouldn't a non-radio control channel defeat RF jammers? Breaking: enlarging the drones sufficiently to include a cockpit with avionics for a human pilot also defeats any RF jammer.

Forbes rediscovers the 1950's Park Flyer. Film at 11.

> DARPA's Close Combat Lethal Recon drone was a fiber-optic guided loitering munition for urban combat

Forbes just really loves pushing lethal "urban" technology. I personally find the habit to be disgusting.

> “I am already asking Ukrainian specialists to test this control technology so that we do not end up behind the enemy,”

It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to destroy urban areas and the civilian populations that live in them.

Forbes, of course, loves this because in our current economic model there's a lot of money to be had in inventing new horrific ways to murder people. Well, that's my "1 of 4 free articles" this month, I guess.