Ukrainian tech startups like Vyriy and Swarmer are building AI-powered drones to help the country combat Russia's ongoing invasion.
The drones can be deployed in fleets of dozens flying simultaneously, adapting to each other's movements and able to complete strikes or surveillance missions without continuous human involvement. Ukraine is looking to deploy autonomous drone fleets in the war, which Swarmer CEO Serhiy Kupriienko says requires automation at scale.
"For a swarm of 10 or 20 drones or robots, it's virtually impossible for humans to manage them," Kupriienko said in an interview with ABS-CBN this week. A human operator might struggle to operate five drones, while AI could potentially manage "hundreds" at a time. Swarmer's AI system is able to plan out each drone's movements and behavior and predict other drones' moves, as well.
While Ukraine has already been developing and using drones on the battlefield against Russia for over a year now, Russian signal jamming poses a concern because it can cause human-operated drones to stop working mid-flight. AI-powered drones, however, are not impacted by this type of signal jamming because once a human assigns the AI drones a mission, there are no further signals sent to the drones in order to complete the task.
The AI lead for a Ukraine-backed tech accelerator told Reuters that drone plans are being developed with the eventual goal of no human connection to drones on the front lines of the war, estimating that AI-powered drone strikes will be substantially more effective than human-guided ones.
"We need maximum automation," said Ukraine's minister of digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, The New York Times reported this month. "These technologies are fundamental to our victory."
While some autonomous drones are still in development, others have already been used on the battlefield to take out Russian targets, according to CNN and the NYT. In April, CNN reported that Ukrainian AI-powered drones with machine vision have been targeting Russian energy sources, like oil refineries. Even autonomous weaponized helicopters are reportedly in the works, which would further lessen the need for direct human involvement in the ongoing war.
"They have this thing called ‘machine vision,’ which is a form of AI. Basically you take a model and you have it on a chip and you train this model to identify geography and the target it is navigating to," Noah Sylvia, a research analyst at the UK think tank Royal United Services Institute, told CNN of the AI drones.
This demand for autonomous drones poses some ethical concerns, but could reduce the human cost of the war. Ukraine's death toll exceeded 70,000 as of August last year since Russia's invasion in 2022, according to an NYT report cited by Congress. Ukraine itself, however, has reported much lower numbers, with President Volodymyr Zelensky asserting that 31,000 Ukrainian troops had died as of February this year.