Unclear to me at what stage the “self-guided” part kicks in here. I can imagine several cases where these can be extremely useful though: One is simply having a self-guidance mechanism that can be turned on at the final approach to when signal can fail due to proximity to the ground. Another case altogether could be to let a munition loiter, and then just activate a self guided attack once a target is found. Also, I could imagine that they could let a drone “taxi” itself to a loitering position before a pilot takes over.
Combine some of these, and suddenly a single pilot can effectively fly a dozen drones at the same time, only needing to check in on a loitering drone, and select targets before checking the next drone. If a drone is used to hit a target, three more can be en route to the location, and the pilot can just take over control as they arrive.
Seeing as one of the disadvantages of drones is that they’re relatively slow, this could massively multiply the amount of damage a single pilot can do!
a self-guidance mechanism that can be turned on at the final approach to when signal can fail due to proximity to the ground
I believe this is exactly what we are seeing.
There is a crosshair that stays centered in frame at the start of each clip. Then a bounding box and smaller crosshairs appear around the target. This bounding box stays on the target, even as the frame moves around. This appears to be when the lock on occurs, which is almost certainly manually triggered as it occurred all three times when the target was in the crosshairs.
At this point, the self-guided part is enabled and the drone does the rest of the approach to the target by itself.
Seeing as one of the disadvantages of drones is that they’re relatively slow, this could massively multiply the amount of damage a single pilot can do!
Absolutely! All those things your mention are well within the capability of tech that is cheap enough to put on small, disposable drones.
Interesting! I think this is likely what’s happening in Pokrovsk direction right now. Ukraine has such a decisive advantage with their drones that russia is using horses and donkeys to resupply their lines. I’m not sure how that helps against drones, but there it is lol.
