Originally Posted By RockNwood:
Another tweet says Russian radio call intercepts confirm all crew were killed. 100. It took several hours for rescue to reach the site so any survivors in the water expired.

And here's the Caesar Kunikov before #Ukraine said hello sailor. It has a crew of around 100. Should Ukraine destroy Russia's illegal #Crimea bridge, then Russia would rely on these large military landing ships to bring in supplies and hardware. Ukrainian video of the attack… https://t.co/v84iJ41KOq pic.twitter.com/Ydov4lwtbH

Glasnost Gone  (@GlasnostGone) February 14, 2024

Originally Posted By burnka871:



Obviously there is an end game to this. The bridge is not long for this world.

Russia’s Automated Killer Drones May Not Be Working As Planned

Russia’s Lancet kamikaze drone has been one of their outstanding successes of the conflict. The low-cost, 35-pound loitering munition has proven especially effective at knocking out artillery, but also tanks and other targets up to 40 miles away. The Lancet was recently upgraded with a new lock-on-target mode, possibly making it the first truly autonomous battlefield weapon, able to find and engage targets without human assistance....but there’s evidence that it has not worked as well as planned, and the automated mode may have been disabled.

A close examination of attack videos posted on social media suggests there was a glitch with Russia's Terminators, and may tell us why.

Lancet Tactics
Lancets usually operate in hunter-killer teams with specialist reconnaissance drones, also produced by ZALA, which make the Lancet. The recon team find and locate targets, passing the coordinates to the Lancet operator, who flies to the spot, confirms the target, and guides the Lancet in for the kill.

However, the makers have always boasted about the Lancet’s level of on-board intelligence, and the latest upgrade appears to give a high level of autonomy. In December, military expert Mikhail Kuzovkin told the Russian TV network REN TV that target acquisition is now automatic and does not require operator input.

"That is, the Lancet itself works out the program, without receiving any external target designation,” Kuzovkin stated, claiming that because it does not need a link to the operator the Lancet is now invulnerable to jamming.

“The role of the operator is minimized. It's not artificial intelligence, it's computer vision. This is automatic target acquisition. That is, the device is becoming more and more autonomous,” according to an official quoted by the paper.

Alexandr Zakharov, CEO of ZALA, dislikes the term AI, seeing the development as just a higher level of automation.

“There is no AI in this drone, just algorithms and decision making,” Zakharov stated in an TV interview in July 2023.

An examination of downed Lancets revealed that they are equipped with the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module, an edge device designed to provide “true AI computing” to small, low-power systems like drones. The TX2 is the size of a credit card is optimized for neural network and machine learning applications with a set of highly parallel GPUs carrying out 30 trillion operations a second. The TX2 drives drones like the Skydio 2, a consumer model described as “freakishly smart” by one reviewer for its ability to plot its own flight path while following a subject and avoiding obstacles without human assistance.

While the American-made TX2 in theory cannot be exported to Russia due to sanctions, it appears to be freely available on Alibaba for about $200 in batches of 100+. ZALA probably do not have too much trouble acquiring them.

The question is just how effectively the TX2 can identify objects on the ground without human oversight.

Locked And Loaded
Lancet attack videos are often posted on social media, giving a good idea of the sort of targets attacked – some 50% of them are artillery pieces or rocket launchers, as the Lancet’s long range making it an highly effective counter-battery tool. It also tells us what an engagement looks like from the operator’s point of view.

In many Lancet video since October, during the final attack the text “Цель захвачена” (“TargetTGT -2.2% locked”) appears on screen, with a moving box which follows the target. This is familiar from modern anti-tank weapons like the Javelin, which the operator locks on to a target before launch.

This “Target locked” symbol can be seen in three of the five Lancet videos here on tank and artillery targets, and in this video from January 31st showing an attack on a truck. It is not seen with more challenging camouflaged targets, which presumably still require operator involvement.

What we cannot tell is whether the target identification is under the control of the operator or autonomous.

“The bounding box following the target suggests the Lancet is using AI for some target recognition, but beyond that I’m not sure we can infer much,” Zak Kallenborn of CSIS's Strategic Technology Program told me. “The Jetson chip appears capable of supporting basic object recognition, but I think it's more a question of how many objects can the Lancet recognize and how reliably.”

The Jetson TX2 may enable a simple seek-and-kill capability against the objects it is able to recognize.

“Basic autonomy to order engagement once a target of a particular type is recognized seems unlikely to require significantly more computing power,” says Kallenborn.

Samuel Bendett, an authority on Russian drones and adviser to both the CNA and CNAS, says that statements that the Lancet is either semi-automatic or fully autonomous are both current.

“I have seen both claims since the MoD wants to promote this as an AI-enabled wonder weapon,” Bendett told me.

However, Lancet may not be so much AI-enabled as AI-disabled.

...Not So Smart Bomb
A video from January 29th shows a Lancet engaging a CV-90 infantry fighting vehicle. The familiar ‘Target locked’ sign appears, and the Lancet appears to be making a straight run at the CV-90 until it diverts at the last second.

“You can see how the relatively new target acquisition system let the operator down,” notes Military Informant, the account that posted the video. “Aiming at a pile of debris instead of an enemy combat vehicle, which is why the miss occurred.”

This is an example of the brittleness of AI-powered vision systems, in which they make mistakes which look ridiculously stupid to human observers. Deep-learning AIs may get confused when an object is seen from an odd angle or may be fooled by something as simple as a sticker. In an extreme case, researchers showed how an AI could be tricked into identifying a plastic turtle as a rifle.

There may be many more similar misses which we have not seen, as these are not usually posted on social media. What we do know is that none of the Lancet videos from the last two weeks or so seem to have the ‘Target locked’ or the accompanying bounding box.

The obvious conclusion is that automated target recognition software was rolled out prematurely and there has been product recall. While the lock was not seen before with complex and confusing shapes like camouflaged artillery, now it does not appear even with simple targets in the open like this infantry fighting vehicle or this tank, both from 3rd Feb.

(It would be nice to be able to claim that this Russian T-90M hit by a Lancet was due to an out-of-control AI, but it seems this was old-school human error as the video dates from before the software upgrade.)

We do not know whether Lancet’s automated recognition is a simple targeting aid, or a sign that Terminator-style robots are being deployed yet. Either way it seems to have been put off until the developers can fix some bugs and have another go; swarming drones with full autonomy are ZALA's ultimate goal as this video shows.

Bendett points out that other Russian groups are developing neural network systems for small drones claimed to "accurately identify objects and equipment in Ukraine, including tanks and infantry fighting vehicles." Far more powerful modules are available than the TX2, which was rolled out in 2019. The technology is coming.

Discussions on autonomous weapons continue at the UN, with optimistic plans for legally-binding international laws regulating them by 2026. By that time such weapons may already have been used on a massive scale.