News Steam Deck Controls a Real Ukrainian Army Machine Gun Turret: Report

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Remote war is coming. It's the next step.

Imagine Boston Dynamic's Atlas robot. Except it has a .45 auto-cannon mounted to each shoulder like the Predator's plasma cannon. There's no stopping it. it can literally just run through a brick wall to get to it's target.

Now imagine it's being controlled by a bunch of 12 year olds that think they're playing a round of Call of Duty, but in reality it's a 10 foot tall armored robot in another country taking out targets with all the response time and accuracy of a call of duty player. Terrifying.
 
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jkflipflop98 said:
Remote war is coming. It's the next step.

Imagine Boston Dynamic's Atlas robot. Except it has a .45 auto-cannon mounted to each shoulder like the Predator's plasma cannon. There's no stopping it. it can literally just run through a brick wall to get to it's target.

Now imagine it's being controlled by a bunch of 12 year olds that think they're playing a round of Call of Duty, but in reality it's a 10 foot tall armored robot in another country taking out targets with all the response time and accuracy of a call of duty player. Terrifying.
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Why would they give the controls to a bunch of 12 year olds?
 
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Really scary. Really really scary. Steam deck is not uber high end difficult to procure software, the hardware can be run in the field and not with a 100 A100 cards and the accompanying infrastructure.
Just imagine a half dozen guns, not assault rifles just pistols or shotguns. Not much use in a battlefield but terrifying in a school. Much less vulnerable to counter fire
 
drajitsh said:
Really scary. Really really scary. Steam deck is not uber high end difficult to procure software, the hardware can be run in the field and not with a 100 A100 cards and the accompanying infrastructure.
Just imagine a half dozen guns, not assault rifles just pistols or shotguns. Not much use in a battlefield but terrifying in a school. Much less vulnerable to counter fire
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The BIG danger with rolling your own gun is that they are unreliable, prone to exploding and lack accuracy.
Wars are evil
 
Haha! I'm already doing this!

To clarify, we made a skid-steer platform with a camera and turret mounted. The turret has a paintball gun mounted (lethal remote platforms are illegal,and you WILL be raided by the ATF!) We are using an ESP32-based Arduino to control it, with SPI interface to the turret. WiFi for the comms to the ESP and camera.

Our setup allows control through (almost) any Android device, including phones, tablets, and Chromecast (Android TV). Primary input is an Xbox controller, via Bluetooth, it also has onscreen controls. We chose not to control through a webpage, but it's certainly possible.

Even with direct WiFi connection (no router), we see a noticeable lag in controls. Especially with video streaming. I have no idea how they expect to compensate for lag when you have a moving target. I guess they are better optimized than my setup.
 
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WisdomLost said:
Even with direct WiFi connection (no router), we see a noticeable lag in controls. Especially with video streaming. I have no idea how they expect to compensate for lag when you have a moving target. I guess they are better optimized than my setup.
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They probably aren't direct controlling it, they're marking targets and let the localized computer Fire Control System take care of things. Ergo, you minimize lag.

You just mark the target, let it do it's thing.
 
WisdomLost said:
Ender's Game... Read it... Then watch it.
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I've read it.
Several times. One of my favorite books.

One of my son's favorite books.
A couple of decades ago, he was the "Ender" of his preteen posse.

The only connection this thing has is that is might be run from a SteamDeck controller.
So what.

Current consumer quadrotors are not that far off the control set of a Predator/Reaper drone.
Said quadrotors are flyable with a cellphone. "oohhh scary"
 
jkflipflop98 said:
Remote war is coming. It's the next step.

Imagine Boston Dynamic's Atlas robot. Except it has a .45 auto-cannon mounted to each shoulder like the Predator's plasma cannon. There's no stopping it. it can literally just run through a brick wall to get to it's target.

Now imagine it's being controlled by a bunch of 12 year olds that think they're playing a round of Call of Duty, but in reality it's a 10 foot tall armored robot in another country taking out targets with all the response time and accuracy of a call of duty player. Terrifying.
Click to expand...
Also seriously hackable.

It would be way too easy for enemy hackers to hijack said robot, then use it against you.

And before you start mentioning encryption, I'll you straight up it would introduce too much lag in the system to be effective at all. It's why drones are not encrypted (and vulnerable).
 
sitehostplus said:
And before you start mentioning encryption, I'll you straight up it would introduce too much lag in the system to be effective at all. It's why drones are not encrypted (and vulnerable).
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What makes you say that? Real time communication has been working with encryption just fine for a long time. All wireless communication with your router is already encrypted (assuming your wifi is secured), and latency is generally acceptable as long as you have good wirelesa coverage. Pinging my router with 64 kB packets I get an average latency of ~40ms, which seems pretty reasonable (I believe even ICMP packets get encrypted for WiFi, as the encryption is at the MAC layer).

Edit: And drone communication is encrypted, according to this article anyway. https://www.wired.com/story/a-clever-radio-trick-can-tell-if-a-drone-is-watching-you/
 
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TJ Hooker said:
What makes you say that? Real time communication has been working with encryption just fine for a long time. All wireless communication with your router is already encrypted (assuming your wifi is secured), and latency is generally acceptable as long as you have good wirelesa coverage. Pinging my router with 64 kB packets I get an average latency of ~40ms, which seems pretty reasonable (I believe even ICMP packets get encrypted for WiFi, as the encryption is at the MAC layer).

Edit: And drone communication is encrypted, according to this article anyway. https://www.wired.com/story/a-clever-radio-trick-can-tell-if-a-drone-is-watching-you/
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In an actual, real time battlefield, any lag is simply too much. It's why US military drones do not have encryption on the actual controls or visual systems. Comms is one thing, remotely operating a weapons system in real time is another thing altogether.

How do you think Iran was able to steal a USAF drone? They ain't smart enough to crack encryption, there was none on there to begin with.
 
sitehostplus said:
How do you think Iran was able to steal a USAF drone? They ain't smart enough to crack encryption, there was none on there to begin with.
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Its a little more nuanced than that.

First, jam the signal.
Second, feed it false GPS data.

Also, this is the only one (that we know of), and it was over a decade ago. Things don't remain static, and likely the whole comm suites have changed.
 
USAFRet said:
Its a little more nuanced than that.

First, jam the signal.
Second, feed it false GPS data.

Also, this is the only one (that we know of), and it was over a decade ago. Things don't remain static, and likely the whole comm suites have changed.
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Yep, and that gps data had zero encryption, which is my point entirely.

Non encrypted stuff is almost too easy to steal, and you can't encrypt the command and control units on drones without negatively impacting performance.

Properly hardened encryption takes time to process. And when speed is of the essence (like you are trying to maneuver a drone through a mountain pass so it doesn't hit the side of a mountain, or maneuvering a tank in a place like NYC so it doesn't ram into a building and get stuck), encryption is useless.

It's a major flaw in remote control warfare, and it's why it's not being widely adopted.
 
sitehostplus said:
Yep, and that gps data had zero encryption, which is my point entirely.

Non encrypted stuff is almost too easy to steal, and you can't encrypt the command and control units on drones without negatively impacting performance.

Properly hardened encryption takes time to process. And when speed is of the essence (like you are trying to maneuver a drone through a mountain pass so it doesn't hit the side of a mountain, or maneuvering a tank in a place like NYC so it doesn't ram into a building and get stuck), encryption is useless.

It's a major flaw in remote control warfare, and it's why it's not being widely adopted.
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So what's the difference between an e2e encrypted video call and controlling a weapon via an encrypted protocol? Signal strength?
 
USAFRet said:
And about 18 seconds later, they're all taken offline and powered down.
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My thoughts exactly. If non-encrypted is necessary for operational control, surely you could have a secondary "kill switch" that's encrypted and still under your control? Could even go as far as to activate a safe "shut down protocol" that could leave the asset recoverable.
 
Droidfreak said:
So what's the difference between an e2e encrypted video call and controlling a weapon via an encrypted protocol? Signal strength?
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It's a speed issue.

A predator drone flies at 130mph. The reaper drone flies at 300mph. To fly that fast in a normal airplane, you need reflexes.

Proper hardened encryption will gum the works up big time, which is why it's not used on the command and control of either aircraft.
 
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