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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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

10 years ago I got into RC planes for a summer, and me and the guy were talking about how ridiculous it is that the milirary is spending so much money on simple drones, when they could just strap some explosives on a cheap hobbyist RC plane/drone for a fraction of the price, and just create swarms of them.

The technology had been widely available for some time already back then. Turns out, it was just lacking a war to do so.

(Just to be clear, we were all anti-war in general, this was just idle speculatiok back then. But if our country was attacked at that time, I'm sure some of us would have ended in a newly created drone force like what happened in the Ukraine.)

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, a rather substantial portion of warfare is the economics behind it. Often, spending eye-watering amounts of money on proprietary, overpriced hardware is the point. It's corporate welfare.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Yeah, especially in peace time. When war heats up and resources get scarce, you use the cheapest thing that does the job. But in peace time you feed your military contractors to keep them happy and to keep them researching and developing so you don't lose out on modern technology development.

(For clarification, with "war time" I mean "being in a war that actually threatens the country". The US hasn't been in a war like that for a very long time. They've essentially being in "peace time" while having military training and testing facilities in the middle east.)

[–] Murvel@lemm.ee 13 points 1 day ago

Those warplanes where destroyed and the world is better for it

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 days ago (6 children)

It's sad to see something made out of love for humanity used for war.

[–] WhirlpoolBrewer@lemmings.world 3 points 19 hours ago

If you think about it, this was perhaps the most humane way to conduct war. No humans were harmed in this attack, and the ability to harm humans was severely degraded. You had drones smash into unmanned airplanes. Nothing but money and hardware was lost. This is the utopian version of war if such a thing could ever exist. One country removes another country's ability to harm humans with nobody getting hurt and everyone gets to go home.

[–] bathing_in_bismuth@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Like humans?

[–] chebra@mstdn.io 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@jsomae it's used to prevent civilian deaths by destroying the weapon that did that. Sounds like love to me. These planes killed children.

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

That's just how war is though. War is always justified by the enemy. I'm not saying it's sad that they choose to defend themselves -- it's sad that they're in a situation where they must.

[–] B0rax@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

You can say that to just about anything. Every weapon system uses stuff that was not developed for this use case. Because so many things are involved there.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Lmao, how can you be sure it's made out of love for humanity? Open source is not always about love or altruism. Most of the times it's just some dude making something for themselves and just have more reason putting it out in the open than selling it. Sometimes it's just boredom and curiosity, sometimes it's about hubris and vanity.

[–] Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago

That just proves how advanced ardupilot really is, is it's considered powerful enough to be used in a special military operation.

[–] doopen@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

“Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots,”

No no!

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Tenkard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've read they attach fiber cables to drones to avoid interference

[–] eRac@lemmings.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This attack hit airbases all over Russia. Smuggling operators into Siberia to fly the drones seems unreasonable.

[–] Tenkard@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah you're definitely right

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Arduino 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 3 points 1 day 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.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 6 points 2 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 1 day 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.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

incredible self-own from ArduPilot co-creator Jason Short:

Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots.

🤡

(of course, in reality, many people were discussing weaponization even on the day diydrones was announced...)

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I mean, that's a pretty believable claim. Most open source developers don't even think their project will be noticed by a lot of people, let alone be used for military purposes. At worst you can accuse him of being ignorant of the realities of how his software will be used but I honestly don't think he was outright lying and secretly wanted his software to be used in weapons or something.

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

He was designing software for hobbyists and later for the consumer market, he is not Oppenheimer.

I think assuming that militaries would design/use specific software and not use software for hobbyist was a reasonable assumption.

[–] Sims@lemmy.ml -2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Too bad, but we just have to live with open source being used for shitty purposes also.

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

There are no reports of Israel or Russia using ArduPilot though.