danAtElodin

So I got a chance to watch this fully through, and fun fact, I was in Iraq as an Armored Cavalry officer when this technology was deployed with the embedded Seal team and special forces unit we supported. I'm very sorry this engineer clearly regrets being what he regards as tricked into developing the technology, but from my experiences, his guilt is misplaced. That technology saved a ton of lives, and allowed us to track and apprehend some really bad dudes. I was the operations center battle captain at the time, so I had a really high degree of knowledge of the information being used to decide on targeting, and it was 100% professional. Huge dossiers on mass pitt style murders, with video evidence, that was required before a target was actioned on, after months of planning. I have zero regrets; this developer should be very proud of his work. I acknowledge that in theory some bad actors can abuse technology for ill, and this current admin definitely disappoints me constantly. But I'm glad we had this tech when we needed it, so as many of my friends could come home as did. We had over a thousand casualties in Iraq over my two deployments, and my unit was 100% all about helping pursue stability and local governance, no nefarious story telling I ever saw. Was it worth all of those lives and money? I'd say no, but only because we as Americans and our system of government doesn't allow for long term thinking, planning, and persistence required to make generational change happen.

Thanks!

Thanks I appreciate it!

I appreciate it, I'd not seen this before, great perspective

I totally agree, very interested anti-drone defenses. You can actually use much of this to model and simulate the drones you want to stop just as well.

Completely agree, details matter for sure. I just returned from a visit to Odessa Ukraine, and observed a maelstrom of drone on drone combat right outside my hotel window to booms and shaking glass. Those experiences make me want to help defend against the indiscriminate strikes however I can. But I concede there is danger in providing the tools.

Anduril is far ahead of anything we can produce here for this competition, but it's certainly a great method for them to identify potential talent who can bring needed skills to their team, hence the grand prize of a job offer. The terms of the competition is they get to use any submission for marketing purposes but the IP remains with the participants. Personally I'm in the camp that the world has bad guys, and they are building technology too. Smartest to make sure yours is better. Professionally we only work on defensive systems, which are in high demand these days.

Both great tools, optimized for slightly different needs. Gazebo is great for simulation and testing of higher level control, or for simulation that doesn't require 1000hz sensor simulation rate. Nvidia Isaac focuses on ML model training workflows, not ideal for interacting directly with your flight software for flight testing your code before you fly. This aims to be software CI/CD for your drone builds.

the included baseline just demonstrates that the Betaflight controller will indeed move to the hard-coded center positions of each gate. So the basic first solver task would be to replace that with a CV or ML inference based approach. We plan to add another demo solver into the sample set that shows this next, currently in progress.