Ukraine's New Pilotless Killer Drones Reduce Skill Level To Operate, Improve Impact

As with many technological innovations in business, Ukraine is finding that for its drone war against Russian armor, aircraft and artillery, the most efficient, cost effective means of implementation is enhancing human operators's skills rather than replacing them altogether. JL

James Marson and colleagues report in the Wall Street Journal:

Speedy, agile craft the size of dinner plates in 2024 became Ukraine’s main defensive weapon against massive Russian ground assaults. The new year will see the rise of killer robots, as computers take over more functions from human pilots, including flying to the battlefield and striking selected targets. Rather than replace drone pilots, new models help them by lowering the skill level. Automating drones can help Ukraine deploy them more effectively. Efficiency is the main problem, due to the skill and labor needed to deploy drones and avoid Russian countermeasures, mainly electronic warfare. The result is that, depending on skill level of pilots, strike rates can be as low as one in 10 craft hitting their target. Drones are already employing computer-vision for autonomous targeting

It was the year of the explosive drone: speedy, agile craft the size of dinner plates that in 2024 became Ukraine’s main defensive weapon against massive Russian ground assaults.

The new year will see the rise of killer robots, as computers take over more functions from human pilots, including flying to the battlefield and striking selected targets.

Automation could help the Ukrainians hold off a giant foe determined to take control of their country no matter the cost in men and machines, even if the new Trump administration slows or halts arms deliveries to Kyiv.

But humans will remain in control. Next-generation drones won’t be swarms of fully automated, computer-controlled slaughterbots that color the dreams of military geeks and the nightmares of moralists. Instead, Ukrainian companies are seeking incremental advances that boost a strike drone’s chances of reaching and hitting its target.

“We have been trying to make autonomous cars for years but still have drivers,” says Andriy Zvirko, chief strategy officer for Sine.Engineering, a Ukrainian drone-technology developer.

Rather than replace drone pilots, Sine aims to help them by lowering the skill level needed to operate a drone, Zvirko says. Augmenting human work with automation is increasingly common across industries. Boeing and Airbus for decades have offered pilots a growing list of options to let onboard computers handle tasks ranging from flying a plane in cruise to landing in dense fog. Companies in sectors from car-making to e-commerce, from Toyota to Amazon.com, have found that a mix of human labor and automation is often most effective.

Industrial robots are usually assigned the tasks they perform better or faster than humans. The same is happening with Ukraine’s drones.

Ukrainian defense planners plot their progression toward full automation on a 10-level ladder of advancement, with fully independent drone swarms near the top. Drones are already in use employing computer-vision for autonomous targeting, and they rank around four on the scale, says Max Makarchuk, head of artificial intelligence at Brave1, a Ukrainian government platform for defense-tech coordination. “We move gradually, depending on the readiness and effectiveness of each type of development, and adapt them for serial or mass production only when they demonstrate practical benefits for the military,” Makarchuk says.

Ukraine produced well over one million small, explosive aerial craft in 2024, and they are now responsible for most front-line strikes, officials say. Most are first-person view drones, or FPVs, controlled by a pilot who wears goggles that stream a live feed from a camera on the machine. Generally less than 10 inches across, they can carry about 9 pounds of explosives over roughly 12 miles and detonate when the drone hits a target.

With artillery shells in short supply for much of 2024, in part because of political delays in fresh U.S. supplies, Ukraine has relied on drones to halt column after column of armored vehicles and kill thousands of Russian infantrymen. But Russia has still advanced, and the Kremlin says its goal of taking effective control over Ukraine remains unchanged. For Ukraine, with a population one-quarter of Russia’s, the best way to stop the invader is to increase Russian losses to an unbearable level while reducing its own costs.

Automating drones can help Ukraine deploy them more effectively. At the moment, efficiency is the main problem, due to the skill and labor needed to deploy drones and to Russian countermeasures, mainly electronic warfare. The result is that, depending on the skill level of pilots, strike rates can be as low as one in 10 craft hitting their target. Instead of seeking one cure-all, Sine is among those companies taking on the challenges piece by piece—seeking the quickest, simplest and most cost-effective solutions to lighten the load on pilots.

The ethos runs counter to the approach of most Western military planners, who generally seek game-changing advances that leapfrog adversaries’ technologies. While those efforts can yield breakthroughs like stealth, GPS and precision-targeting, they can take years to emerge, devour vast sums and end up as expensive failures. Ukraine’s wartime approach aims to keep development time and budgets at minimum for maximum results.

“You can create the best thing in the world, but it can cost a lot and you can’t produce a lot in a short period of time,” says Andriy Chulyk, co-founder and chief executive of Sine. “But we are fighting now.” Russian electronic-warfare equipment is the main impediment to successful strikes. Russian jammers seek to overload the frequencies used to send signals from the pilot’s controller to the drone, causing it to crash. Ukrainian drones also need to avoid friendly jammers used to stop Russian craft. That means a skilled pilot needs to steer a careful path and avoid all electronic-warfare equipment to reach the target.

Sine was founded in 2022 and got its start providing its own jammers that counter Russian surveillance drones. After realizing that most drone manufacturers used cheap commercial communications units on their craft, Sine created a replacement command-and-control module that works across many bandwidths simultaneously, allowing it to avoid jammers focused on specific frequencies.

“Usually a pilot has to find a way to reach the battlefield and avoid all that jamming. Our module does this automatically,” Chulyk says.

No device is unjammable, Chulyk acknowledges, but the aim is to create an affordable solution that can’t be reasonably countered in a front-line trench system, given the cost and power demands of fielding many jammers. Sine produces thousands of the modules a month and sells them at an affordable price, to make a thin profit to reinvest into further research and production.

It is one of dozens of startups in Ukraine tackling various aspects of drone warfare and automation. Many both compete and cooperate, coordinating through Brave1.

“We cooperate with everyone who has promising solutions, both in Ukraine and abroad,” says Makarchuk at Brave1. Next up, Sine sought to address the lack of GPS on the front lines. Russian electronic warfare equipment knocks out GPS signals or sends false readings. Ukrainian pilots must rely on instructions from a navigator comparing the feed from a camera with a map in order to direct the drone to the target.

By adding software to the module, which is smaller than a playing card, and deploying a ground station and two beacons, Sine allows the pilot to pinpoint the location of a drone down to as little as 20 yards. Zvirko says it’s similar to technology used to track planes before GPS was deployed.

Using the positioning system, Sine is close to delivering a solution that enables the drones to fly themselves to the battlefield.

Currently, a drone pilot requires several weeks of training and can deploy one FPV at a time as part of a three-person team also including an assistant and a technician. Flying the drone to the target can be difficult: Russia deploys jammers that target analog video frequencies, cutting the feed to the pilot and making it impossible to fly.

Sine’s system, which is in final testing before battlefield deployment in coming weeks, can deliver a conveyor belt of drones for a pilot to take over and strike with. An operator uses an app created by Sine to control as many as 10 drones and select a point on a map that they will fly to. That allows a pilot to concentrate on his main role: Striking targets. Zvirko described it as like playing on a computer game with a cheat code for unlimited ammunition.

Sine is working with partners including Ukrainian startup Vyriy Drone on integrating the delivery system with so-called terminal guidance, a form of autopilot that allows operators to select a target for the drone to direct itself to, evading jamming aimed at overloading the link between pilot and craft. That could allow a single operator to direct several drones from launch to target, potentially in a location far from the battlefront where they will face fewer risks.

“With all the homing and the guidance, they could be in New York,” Zvirko says.Enhanced technology will allow tactics to evolve. If one unit is sending the drones to the battlefield, three different teams could be picking them up and piloting them, hitting Russian positions from three different sides at the same time.

“Everything we are doing here, we are trying to lower the expertise of the guys who will use it,” says Chulyk. “For them, it will be like a computer game.”