KB Stratim engineers developed the Rusak-S drone with target recognition and homing

Drone with target recognition and homing
KB Stratim engineers developed the Rusak-S drone with target recognition and homing at the final part of the trajectory. The post contains some details about the technology and a link to a telegram bot that can recognize military equipment in your video.

What is homing and why is it needed?
Homing is an algorithm that puts the drone into automatic flight mode, in which all decisions occur on board, as a result of which the copter no longer needs to receive commands from the operator. This eliminates the risk of loss of communication and control due to distance, difficult terrain, or active electronic warfare.

How does homing work?
The drone is equipped with a single-board computer that locks onto the selected target and takes over control, issuing commands to the flight controller. The functionality is similar to the Javelin homing head, but the price is measured not in hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in tens of thousands of rubles, which allows you to install the system on a regular FPV drone.

How does target recognition work?
The neural network on board the single-board computer is responsible for recognition. We trained it on terabytes of video, which allows it to accurately locate artillery, armored vehicles and vehicles while flying. Recognized objects are highlighted with frames for operator convenience. A drone with a neural network has two advantages:
1. The neural network, unlike the operator, sees the image without interference, so pointing at a recognized object is possible, even if only “snow” is visible in the glasses.
2. Such a drone will be able to operate in completely autonomous mode, but more on that in other posts.

You can check the operation of our neural network by using the telegram bot @stratim_detect_bot . Send him a video from Mavic or FPV, and he will recognize a tank or other armored vehicle on it. Instructions for use follow the link .

As you understand, high military technologies are becoming closer, and their implementation is becoming more accessible.

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Bot access 

At the very beginning the bot will ask you to enter a password, now it is STRATIM2024 

Before starting work 

The recognition algorithm expects a “clean video” as input, exactly the one that the system can receive directly on board. For example, send video from Mavic or from the memory of an FPV drone to the bot. Videos that contain:

“snow” from recording on fpv glasses

watermarks of other channels

strong compression or simply filmed on a phone can cause the system to not work correctly.

It is also worth noting that the model works well only with videos taken from a drone; photographs taken from equipment at point-blank range or with too much zoom on the equipment will have detection flaws, this rule can be visualized as:

How to use

You can attach files from your phone or forward them to open channels or conversations;

The entry limit is currently for files up to 300MB or videos up to 3 minutes long;

The bot accepts both pictures and videos in the 10 most common file formats;

Work specifics

Average processing time is about 1.5x the time of the original video;

At the moment the bot works with 4 classes: 

heavy military equipment (tanks), 

light military equipment (armored personnel carriers, armored vehicles),  

heavy civil transport (trucks, gazelles, loaves), 

light civil transport (cars)

each class has a corresponding category name