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.

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[–] Skua@kbin.earth 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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 3 points 2 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.