This clip showsa drone dropping explosives. It can apparently hover. I thought they have Radio Shack rotor drones. This one apparently can carry enough load to have large bombs. They appear to be unguided bombs.
I didn’t realize quad copters could carry anything besides a small camera.
Yeah, Google is my friend.
There are numerous reports of drones dropping/delivering contraband (drugs, cigs, phone, chargers into prisons; why not bombs?
Useful bombs generally weigh several orders of magnitude more than drugs, cigarettes, phones, etc.
A drone that can carry a pound or two far enough to hop over a prison fence is cheap and easy to come by. One that can carry dozens of pounds a long enough distance to to serve as a weapon is a different class of device.
If you look at the video, you’ll see it’s a grenade-sized device that gets dropped onto an ammo dump.
This site states a DJI Phantom 4 (very popular, very common in hobby shops around the world, and all over the place where I am in the M.E.) can pick up just over a pound of payload.
There are bigger quad, hex, and octacopters that can pick up way more than that; I’ve seen them in a couple of the hobby shops here.
It sounds like the confusion is more about what sort of payload is viable vs what sort of drones they have?
I do remember 2 drones lifting a ‘smallish’ child off the ground, so there must be some lifting capacity of the on the shelf drones.
That is not a large bomb. In that clip and others I’ve seen they appear to be using something like a 40mm grenade.
You would probably be arrested for that here, despite how much the smallish child enjoyed it. :dubious:
The lifting part isn’t the problem; Amazon and Domino’s have proposed drone deliveries. A hand grenade or RPG warheads are not that heavy. (Note that much of an anti-armor RPG warhead are two cones filled with air - see cutaway in Wiki reference below about 8" down on the right). The release mechanism is the key. IANADE* but I suppose there are unused radio channels that can be used to trigger a release.
M67 HE frag grenade weighs 14 oz. (400g)
RPG-7VL HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) weighs 5.7 lb. (2.6kg) but you don’t need to attach the launch motor portion (2-piece variant) if you are dropping from a drone.
US 60mm mortar rounds weight in the range or 3-4 lb. Other countries are similar. Early versions could be armed by removing the wrap-around safety pins and smacking the round smartly straight down on it’s base to release the setback safety (you can see the soldiers doing this in Saving Pvt. Ryan as the Germans are closing in. Ref. for weights and types - 60mm Mortar Ammunition And Fuzes
*I am not a drone enthusiast.
What does this mean? Could’t they just program the thing to release when a certain GPS coordinate is reached?
They probably need to aim better than that.
Off-the-shelf consumer drones don’t really have a cargo/bomb bay, much less a remote trigger. They’re typically just flying cameras.
It’s not a huge technical hurdle, but you do have to get someone to:
- engineer the mechanical portion
- wire the mechanical portion up to a microcontroller / drone computer so it can be electronically controlled
- write the software for a remote release, whether it’s triggered by GPS or manually
You can do all of that using the standard prosumer/hobbyist drone kits coupled with something like Arduino robotics kids or maybe even a Lego Mindstorms arm. A serious high school tinkerer could probably put that together. In the US the most difficult part would just be getting the explosive. The rest of the stuff is all perfectly in the hobbyist realm… people drop water balloons with them frequently: drone water balloon drop - Google Search
In ISISland, I suppose finding someone who’s willing to make all that happen, who you haven’t killed yet, and who is willing to work for you… is probably the only hard part. The rest is just smuggling in standard COTS drones and hobbyist robotics parts.
You’ll notice that the bomb is dropped from hover during low wind. There’s not even basic WW2-style aiming, accounting for the aircraft’s momentum and all that. The bomb tumbles through its descent, despite having fins to stabilize it. Maybe it’s not the right kind of ordnance? Maybe a repurposed mortar? I dunno. The video also cuts after the initial tiny explosion. Why? Did the bomb fail to detonate properly, and they had to send someone else in there to blow the rest of it up, using the drone just as a PR gimmick?
Heck, we used to put warheads on model rockets. Err, I mean, I heard of someone who did that.
Dennis
I’m not even sure there’s that much to it for a basic delivery system. Anything from a DJI on up has a gimballed, controllable camera.
Remove the camera & replace it with a cup (i.e. 40mm grenade holder).
When you tilt the [del]camera[/del] cup down, you are essentially opening the bomb bay doors & gravity takes control of the 40mm grenade.
Now if you want to video from that drone, you have two options:
[ul]
[li]Two controllers [/li][li]Fix the camera in a downward position & use the gimbal to control the “bomb-bay doors” while flying directly overhead of what you’re bombing.[/li][/ul]
It would be fairly simple to hook up a wire reel to a drone to avoid a counterattack by radio jamming. Technology exist and TOW missiles are reportedly being used by Syrian rebels. A drone could use a fishing reel since it doesn’t fly as fast as a TOW missile. Drones exist that carry humans now. It’s only a matter of time before one get weaponized. I would expect to see a drone terror attack within the next two years.
This stuff is only beginning, and it’ll evolve rapidly when conditions warrant. When scouting planes were introduced during WWI, they were unarmed - but the pilots quickly started carrying pistols to shoot wildly at one another, lengths of chain to dangle into each others’ props, grenades and bombs and water balloons to throw overboard, etc etc. Air combat’s come a long way and it ain’t done yet.
That’s kind of pessimistic. “Pickle when reaching coordinates so-and-so” is arguably more accurate than bombardment doctrine for most of the history of aerial bombardment.
They’re not implementing full-up smart bombs; they’re replacing mortars. As such, this is quite possibly orders of magnitude better in range and accuracy, with the trade-down of reliability (incoming mortar shells are harder to knock down than a prosumer drone is).
I’m not sure what you mean. This is not the beginning. Drones that fire laser guided Hellfire missiles already exist. This is a low tech step back from existing technology, not the beginning.