A group of 20-somethings built a GPS-independent drone in 24 hours—and caught the eye of US special operations forces
Here’s what that says about the new class of defense industry disruptors.
Patrick Tucker | August 22, 2024
Drones Ukraine Artificial Intelligence
In February, 24-year-old Ian Laffey decided to take a break from the project he was working on—an AI tool for email—and attend a hackathon in San Francisco. While there, he met a handful of Ukrainians fresh from the front lines, looking for new tech they could bring to the cause.
Ukraine has gotten around shortages in artillery by relying on cheap drones. But those drones require GPS guidance, which can be jammed.
So over the course of a couple days, with very little sleep, Ian and his two partners figured out a new system to allow drones to locate where they were, without having to rely on a signal beamed down from a constellation of satellites. The trick: have the drone’s cameras take pictures and compare those to a database of Google image maps, using simple machine learning. Within 24 hours, the team had cobbled together a GPS-independent drone for less than $500.
“You can fit a lot of compressed maps on, like, a 256-gigabyte SD card if you compress them the right way…We can fit, you know, 10,000 plus-square kilometers,” Laffey told Defense One. Uploading the maps onto the small computer that can be affixed to virtually any drone frame takes just a couple of hours.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2024/08/group-20-somethings-built-gps-independent-drone-24-hoursand-caught-eye-us-special-operations-forces/399017/?oref=d1-skybox-hp
