"Ukraine rushes to create AI-enabled war drones", 18 July 2024

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 a rollout of AI-enabled drones across the front line will help it overcome increasing signal jamming by the Russians as well as enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to work in larger groups...

One company working on this is Swarmer, which is developing software that links drones in a network. Decisions can be implemented instantly across the group, with a human only stepping in to green-light automated strikes...

"When you try to scale up (with human pilots), it just doesn't work," Swarmer CEO Serhiy Kupriienko told Reuters 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."...

Kupriienko said that while human pilots struggled to run operations involving more than five drones, AI would be able to process hundreds...

The system, called Styx, directs a web of reconnaissance and strike drones, both large and small, in the air and on the ground. Every drone would be able to plan its own moves and predict the behaviour of the others in the swarm, he said...

Swarmer's technology is still under development and has only been trialled on the battlefield experimentally, he added...

There are broad concerns 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 of going to war...

The need for AI-enabled drones is becoming more pressing as both sides roll out Electronic Warfare (EW) systems that disrupt signals between pilots and drones...

In Ukraine, the key task for manufacturers is to produce an AI targeting system for drones which is cheap. That 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.