[nostrademons]

Any reasonable autonomous control system is going to have sensor fusion to combine different wavelengths of sensor data together. Kalman Filters are a thing, even outside of military applications. You're going to need countermeasures that are anti-CV, anti-radar, and anti-IR measures in one source to confuse a well-made autonomous drone.

Even then, if they just put a bullet into anything that has the approximate optical & heat signature of a human, it'll work fine. Who cares if you blow up a few inflatable mannequins and flares if you also get all the soldiers?

[10000truths]

This is very clearly divorced from the realities of warfare.

* A Kalman filter is an algorithm, not a magical wand. How is that algorithm implemented? What are the parameters? How are they tuned? How is the state, and uncertainty thereof, modeled? How accurate is that model in the field? Details and implementations matter. Finding answers that work reliably in the field, even for a limited set of circumstances, takes huge amounts of time, money and talent, and involves a continuous process of trial and error.

* Drones have a limited payload capacity, which means a limited amount of ammo to burn on false positives, and a limited amount of smarts and sensors with which to process their environment.

* Many attacks rely on the element of surprise to catch the enemy unaware, or leave them with little time to plan - shooting fake targets alerts others to your presence and can quickly give away your position, providing time to take cover and/or stage a counterattack.

* The people developing the smarts for these drones are a limited resource that need to be found, hired, and paid, and they have to play a cat-and-mouse game to maintain the robustness of the targeting system.

* Asymmetric warfare is a time-honored guerilla favorite. It doesn't matter how fancy and sophisticated your drone's targeting system is if rendering it useless is cheaper, and wasting ammo on non-targets can very much tip the scales here.

[pbmonster]

That system is already orders of magnitude more complex than a small autonomous suicide done with a cheap camera, and probably not within reach even for the big players for at least a couple of years. At least of you want to do that with a solid, reliable targeting system and have at least some friendly fire prevention in place.

And more importantly, that's what I mean with arms race. Now the mannequins in the trenches get a little heater element to keep them at body temperature, and they get internal water bladders with the appropriate radar cross section, ect. Easily doable today, and orders of magnitude cheaper than a sensor fusion drone.

Add counter drones and point defense cannons, and the attack drones need rocket motors for final approach, which makes CV another order of magnitude more difficult, ect