Old rc aircraft like plane or helicopter don’t even have microncontroller, they stabilize only with pilot input and mechanical gyro, and can be equipped with camera and vtx for BLOS control.
Modern rc aircraft does have eletronics components for better control/smaller size, but the computing requirement is small for it to stabilize. Plane in particular is stable by design, so the computing requirement is so small that the radio receiver directly drive servo output from pilot input and electronics gyro, without the use of external control circuit. Multicopter also needs little computing to hover, but quite a bit more for aggresive maneuver (currently flight controller using stm32f4 is very popular, which has clock speed of 168MHz, much lower than commerical computer’s but is more than enough for the purpose)
Russia certainly can make their own manual suicide drone without importing any parts. Autonomous drone otoh is hard because it requires computer vision algorithm running inference to detect target, which requires edge gpu (which is nvidia only) or computer-like cpu to run real-time with usable update rate. Trade-off can be made by lower camera resolution to the extreme for faster processing speed, at the cost of not being able to capture feature that enable more sophisticate differentiation.
Their Loitering munition “lancet” uses Nvidia jetson, and they are upgrading it with target acquisition software and autonomous mode, to counter effects of Electronic hardware
Old rc aircraft like plane or helicopter don’t even have microncontroller, they stabilize only with pilot input and mechanical gyro, and can be equipped with camera and vtx for BLOS control.
Modern rc aircraft does have eletronics components for better control/smaller size, but the computing requirement is small for it to stabilize. Plane in particular is stable by design, so the computing requirement is so small that the radio receiver directly drive servo output from pilot input and electronics gyro, without the use of external control circuit. Multicopter also needs little computing to hover, but quite a bit more for aggresive maneuver (currently flight controller using stm32f4 is very popular, which has clock speed of 168MHz, much lower than commerical computer’s but is more than enough for the purpose)
Russia certainly can make their own manual suicide drone without importing any parts. Autonomous drone otoh is hard because it requires computer vision algorithm running inference to detect target, which requires edge gpu (which is nvidia only) or computer-like cpu to run real-time with usable update rate. Trade-off can be made by lower camera resolution to the extreme for faster processing speed, at the cost of not being able to capture feature that enable more sophisticate differentiation.
Their Loitering munition “lancet” uses Nvidia jetson, and they are upgrading it with target acquisition software and autonomous mode, to counter effects of Electronic hardware