Ukraine's Massive Drone Attack Was Powered by Open Source Software
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Ukraine used ArduPilot to help it wipe out Russian targets. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/3516835

Ukraine used ArduPilot to help it wipe out Russian targets. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

Open source software used by hobbyist drones powered an attack that wiped out a third of Russia’s strategic long range bombers on Sunday afternoon, in one of the most daring and technically coordinated attacks in the war.

In broad daylight on Sunday, explosions rocked air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo in Russia, which are hundreds of miles from Ukraine. The Security Services of Ukraine’s (SBU) Operation Spider Web was a coordinated assault on Russian targets it claimed was more than a year in the making, which was carried out using a nearly 20-year-old piece of open source drone autopilot software called ArduPilot.

ArduPilot’s original creators were in awe of the attack. “That’s ArduPilot, launched from my basement 18 years ago. Crazy,” Chris Anderson said in a comment on LinkedIn below footage of the attack.

  • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
    143·
    4 days ago

    Why are they using ardupilot for this instead of iNav? It all looked FPV operated. None of the autonomy was used.

    • Skua@kbin.earth
      101·
      4 days ago

      Might just be that it’s what the operators were already familiar with. I’ve never used either; is there some reason that Ardupilot would be bad rather than just overkill for this use?

      • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
        4·
        3 days ago

        In general Ardupilot is more geared towards robotics and autonomy. It allows the setting of waypoints for things like spraying crops so that it follows a path autonomously instead of being controlled manually. When controlling the drone manually iNav is simpler and generally more preferred by FPV users.

    • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
      2·
      4 days ago

      How could so many operators coordinate and then disappear? Seems that there were no Ukrainians nearby. FPV operating via Internet would be impossible due to lags and unstable signal.

      • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        ArduPilot sounds like it could make high latency piloting possible:

        ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost.

      • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
        4·
        3 days ago

        Looking at the video footage they flew extremely slowly at the end. The planes were stationary so they positioned themselves above the planes and then slowly descended.