In Ukraine, a handful of startups are developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to help fly a vast fleet of drones, taking warfare into uncharted territory as combatants race to gain a technological edge in battle. Ukraine hopes that deploying AI-enabled drones across the front lines will help it overcome increasing signal jamming by the Russians and enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to work in larger groups.
AI drone development in Ukraine is broadly divided into three areas: visual systems that help identify targets and fly drones into them, terrain mapping for navigation, and more complex programs enabling UAVs to operate in interconnected “swarms.” One company at the forefront of this development is Swarmer, which is creating software to link drones in a network. This allows decisions to be implemented instantly across the group, with a human only stepping in to approve automated strikes.
“When you try to scale up with human pilots, it just doesn’t work,” said Swarmer CEO Serhiy Kupriienko in the company’s Kyiv offices. “For a swarm of 10 or 20 drones or robots, it’s virtually impossible for humans to manage them.” Swarmer is one of more than 200 tech firms that have sprung up since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, with civilians from IT backgrounds developing drones and other devices to help Ukraine counter a much larger enemy.
Kupriienko noted that while human pilots struggle to manage operations involving more than five drones, AI could handle hundreds. The system, called Styx, directs a network of reconnaissance and strike drones, both large and small, in the air and on the ground. Each drone can plan its own moves and predict the behavior of others in the swarm. Besides scaling up operations, Kupriienko said automation would help protect drone pilots, who are priority targets for enemy fire and often operate close to the front lines.
Swarmer’s technology is still under development and has only been trialed experimentally on the battlefield. Samuel Bendett, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said AI drone control systems would likely need a human in the loop to prevent errors in target selection. Broad concerns exist about the ethics of weapons that exclude human judgment. A 2020 European Parliament research paper warned that such systems could commit violations of international humanitarian law and lower the threshold for going to war.
AI is already being used in some of Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes, which target military facilities and oil refineries hundreds of kilometers inside Russia. One Ukrainian official, speaking anonymously, told Reuters that these attacks sometimes involve a swarm of about 20 drones. The core drones fly to the target, while others take out or distract air defenses along the way. They use a form of AI with human oversight to help spot targets or threats and plan possible routes.
The need for AI-enabled drones is becoming more pressing as both sides deploy Electronic Warfare (EW) systems that disrupt signals between pilots and drones. Small, cheap FPV (first-person view) drones, which became the main method for both sides to hit enemy vehicles in 2023, are seeing their hit rates fall as jamming increases. “We are already working with the concept that in the near future, there will be no connection on the front line between pilot and UAV,” said Max Makarchuk, the AI lead for Brave1, a defense tech accelerator set up by the Ukrainian government.
According to Makarchuk, the percentage of FPVs that hit their target is constantly falling. Most FPV units now have a strike rate of 30-50%, while for new pilots it can be as low as 10%. He predicted that AI-operated FPV drones could achieve hit rates of around 80%. To counter the EW threat, developers including Swarmer have started creating functions that allow a drone to lock onto a target through its camera. EW systems form an invisible signal-jamming dome over the equipment and soldiers they protect. If a pilot’s contact with the drone is cut, they can no longer control it, and the craft either plummets to the ground or continues flying straight on. Automating the final part of a drone’s flight to its target means that it no longer needs the pilot, thus nullifying the effect of the EW’s jamming.
AI-enabled drones have been in development for years but have been seen as expensive and experimental until now. Bendett said Russia had been developing AI-enabled aerial and ground drones before the 2022 invasion and had claimed some successes. In Ukraine, the key task for manufacturers is to produce an AI targeting system for drones that is cheap. This would allow it to be deployed en masse along the entire 1,000 km (621 mile) front line, where thousands of FPV drones are used up each week. Costs can be brought down by running AI programs on a Raspberry Pi, a small, cheap computer that has found global popularity outside the educational purposes it was designed for. Makarchuk estimated the cost of installing a simple targeting system, which would lock onto a shape visible to the drone’s camera, at only about $150 per drone.