A human is not piloting the drone. It patrols even if it lost communication due to jamming. It does need communication to ask the human for authorization to strike.
> It does need communication to ask the human for authorization to strike.
well.. about that. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"
I wonder about the feasibility of an IFF-like mechanism at the level of individual soldiers. The drone could be designed not to attack when a nearby transmitter is broadcasting a prearranged encrypted code that's dependent on elapsed mission time or some other hard-to-spoof factor. Any humans caught out in the open without the IFF signal present are fair game.
I think you can do this relatively simply with infrared led lights. Imagine "Please don't kill me" remote controls. You are a bit more visible when broadcasting, but presumably you can be selective when turning it on.
You need some thing that the enemy cannot spoof. That means two way communication and a shared secret (public private key may count).
Then we need to ask what happens if communication itself fails? An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications. Either you do nothing in that case because there might be something you can't communicate with, or you kill your own people