Edit: Damn, I did not expect so many responses. Thank you, I’ve learned a fair amount about drone strikes in the last few hours.
In: Technology
Drones are just remote control aircraft, and they can employ the same guided bombs and missiles that manned aircraft do. The drone operator “paints” the target with a laser on the drone, and the missile or bomb follows the laser to the target.
All the US-operated ground-strike UAVs use the AGM-114 ‘Hellfire’ air-to-ground missile, in addition to several types bomb. The hellfire missile, as well as the some types of guided bomb, are guided with laser beam riding. Basically, there is a fancy [dome camera](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/images/images2000x2000/flir_n133ed_2_1mp_poe_day_night_1168089.jpg) on the bottom of the drone with a powerful laser pointer with a very specific color that isnt visible to human eyes. In order to guide the missile to a target, the camera points the laser at the target, and a fancy camera on the front of the missile uses fins on the missile to steer it to point at the laser dot on the ground. If the target is moving, the camera just moves the laser to follow the target as it moves, and the missile will continually adjust to point at the laser dot.
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some older generation laser/ thermal imaging seekers could be defeated temporarily at least by close flare/ smoke ejectors and/ or chaffe bursts as well by ‘ dazzle ‘ multi faceted IR/ UV (?) reflectors, attempting to actively misguide various guided ground and air to air weapons. fog, bad weather, thick smoke and/ or industrial smog could significantly degrade their capabilities. then came GPS and suddenly far less missed, allowing for smaller but far more accurate weapons.
So what makes a drone stay focused on a target then? Does the drone map an outline of what the shape of it is? And then the infra-red (or whatever) lasers just keep focused on it, as well as continuously scanning around it to make sure it stays locked on it?
I was wondering like what if a similarly-shaped object came into close proximity. Would the drone be able to differ between the two if they were very similar? Say a basketball was being tracked as it bounced/rolled down a hill, and a soccerball either hit the basketball, or rolled/bounced alongside it.
Or maybe even identical basketballs. Could the drone stay tracked on the one it was set for, even if they were both madly bouncing around in a small area?
Missile follows a laser being fired by a targeting pod on the UAV. The targeting pod camera can follow the target it’s shooting the laser at simply by tracking the difference in contrast between the target object and the ground.
So you know how your cat follows the laser as you point it on the wall and will jump on your aunt when she isn’t looking and I point it at her back?
Now imagine the cat was thrown out of an airplane and blows up when it catches the dot.
Think of the drone as a remote control plane flown by one person with another operating a very powerful laser/camera. Now think of that laser like a flashlight. At the distance the plane operates the laser looks more like a large flashlight beam than a laser beam. The AGM-114 Hellfire missile has a seeker on the front, think of this as an eye.
When the missile is shot the eye on it searches for the flashlight beam and attempts to guide itself to it. This flashlight beam is essentially “flown” onto the target by the camera operator who is well trained at moving the camera/laser. There is a lot more to it than that but that’s the ELI5 version. Hope this helped!
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