Russia field-testing new AI drone powered by Nvidia's Jetson Orin supercomputer

[midian182]

In a nutshell: There have been plenty of stories about the US using AI to create a new generation of autonomous weapons, but other countries are doing the same thing. One of these is Russia, which is said to be using a drone powered by Nvidia's Jetson Orin supercomputer.

Russia is using the self-piloting abilities of AI in its new MS001 drone that is currently being field-tested. Ukrainian Major General Vladyslav Klochkov wrote in a LinkedIn post that MS001 is able to see, analyze, decide, and strike without external commands. It also boasts thermal vision, real-time telemetry, and can operate as part of a swarm.

The drone's AI smarts come via a Jetson Orin, a $249 palm-sized generative AI supercomputer that the company revealed last December. It features 67 INT8 TOPS (trillion operations per second) and 102 GB/s memory bandwidth. At its core is an Nvidia Ampere architecture GPU with tensor cores, paired with a 6-core Arm CPU.

The MS001 doesn't need coordinates; it is able to take independent actions as if someone was controlling the UAV. The drone is able to identify targets, select the highest priorities, and adjust its trajectories. Even GPS jamming and target maneuvers can prove ineffective. "It is a digital predator," Klochkov warned.

In addition to the Jetson Orin, the remains of MS001 that was shot down last month revealed a thermal imager for night/low-visibility operations, Nasir GPS with CRPA antenna for spoof-proof navigation, FPGA chips for onboard adaptive logic, and a radio modem for telemetry and swarm communication.

The MS001 design is a variant of the Iranian-designed Shahed drones. A similar new Russian UAV, dubbed the V2U, was recently discovered to also be powered by the Jetson Orin, which was inserted into a Chinese-made Leetop A603 carrier board. That drone is described as a smart suicide attack unmanned aerial vehicle with artificial intelligence.

Since early 2022, the US has effectively banned advanced-chip exports to Russia and blacklisted hundreds of Russian buyers. Yet battlefield tear-downs still reveal team Green's technology: smugglers re-label it as consumer gadgets and forward small parcels through shell companies in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Turkey. US investigators estimate about $17 million in Nvidia hardware slipped through these grey-market routes in 2023 – evidence that diversion networks keep the chips flowing despite sanctions.

AI drones are becoming an increasingly popular weapon in theaters of war. Palmer Luckey's Anduril Industries last year unveiled new AI-powered kamikaze drones. The technology is also being used to create autonomous jets, with the US Air Force successfully testing the dogfighting capabilities of these vehicles against human pilots.

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Russia field-testing new AI drone powered by Nvidia's Jetson Orin supercomputer

 

[Kirby1]

Don't take the bait.

 

[Dreadcthulhu]

It looks like the Jetson Origin boards are being put together in China. Is it really a surprise that some of them are being shipped north to Russia? The rise of China's manufacturing ability has massively reduced the effectiveness of sanctions issued by everyone else.

 

[SRB]

While these items are no doubt advanced and a threat, I'm not seeing how what is essentially a 6 core rasberry pi with beefed up ARM cores and an NPU slightly more powerful that the Ryzen AI cpu's make this the most intelligent, capable drones yet. I will say that it is currently the most powerful single board computer with an NPU that is extremely cheap, available in mass quantities, and probably NOT on the export list except for Russia, and that's because of the Ukraine trade sanctions, not the AI sanctions.

They could probably improve them by using RTX gpus to make them more effective, but when these are available for $249 in the US, I'd imagine these are priced just right as single use drone controllers.

And yes, sanctions are a sieve that can be circumvented. While you implied they are useless, is it the article's (or author's) position we should drop all sanctions on China as well as Russia?

 

[Theinsanegamer]

While these items are no doubt advanced and a threat, I'm not seeing how what is essentially a 6 core rasberry pi with beefed up ARM cores and an NPU slightly more powerful that the Ryzen AI cpu's make this the most intelligent, capable drones yet. I will say that it is currently the most powerful single board computer with an NPU that is extremely cheap, available in mass quantities, and probably NOT on the export list except for Russia, and that's because of the Ukraine trade sanctions, not the AI sanctions.

They could probably improve them by using RTX gpus to make them more effective, but when these are available for $249 in the US, I'd imagine these are priced just right as single use drone controllers.

And yes, sanctions are a sieve that can be circumvented. While you implied they are useless, is it the article's (or author's) position we should drop all sanctions on China as well as Russia?

Most aircraft are using very old technology. The F-22 raptor ran on an IBM mainframe that couldnt even run DOOM. The F-35 is using pentium IV era tech, it's capable of a whopping 75 gigaflops of computing power.

The MQ9 Reaper drone used by the US military is similarly old, with its first flight in 2001 its running on even slower hardware then the F-35.

Compared to that, the Orin board is a screaming beast of a computer. The slowest Jetson is the Nano, and that is 1040 GFLOP by comparison. Most are between 2-3 TFLOP, or 2-3000 GFLOP, and the fastest AGX is pushing over 5 TFLOP.

It looks like the Jetson Origin boards are being put together in China. Is it really a surprise that some of them are being shipped north to Russia? The rise of China's manufacturing ability has massively reduced the effectiveness of sanctions issued by everyone else.

No, its not really a surprise. A lot of people criticized the sanctions for this very reason, if you're not producing the hardware, and an ally isnt either, you're going to really struggle to contain the flow of hardware. It'd be like Russia banning the EU from purchasing American grain.

 

[techstrike]

Personally, this is so unacceptable... and I'm talking to NVidia.

From a games graphics cards company to a military company.

Shame on you NVidia, you are a bad company where money is your only concern.