KYIV, Ukraine
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.
AI drone development in
Ukraine is broadly split between visual systems helping identify targets and
fly drones into them, terrain mapping for navigation, and more complex
programmes enabling UAVs to operate in interconnected "swarms".
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."
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.
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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.
As well as scaling up
operations, Kupriienko said automation would help protect drone pilots who
operate close to the front lines and are a priority target for enemy fire.
Swarmer's technology is still
under development and has only been trialled on the battlefield experimentally,
he added.
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 the system making errors in
target selection.
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.
AI is already being used in
some of Ukraine's long-range
drone strikes which target military facilities and oil refineries
hundreds of kilometres inside Russia.
One Ukrainian official,
speaking anonymously, told Reuters that the attacks sometimes involve a swarm
of about 20 drones.
The core drones fly to the
target, but it is the job of others to take out or distract air defences along
the way. To do this, they use a form of AI with human oversight to help spot
targets or threats and plan possible routes, the source added.
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