Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Ukrainian drone firms are moving the flying into the airframe so one operator can watch several
Frontline Robotics says soldiers asked for one person to run several robots, and its newer drones now fly to a target area and return on a single button press, with the decision to use force still held by a human.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Frontline Robotics says soldiers asked for one person to control different robots and for easier pilot shifts, and it answered with software that flies a drone to a target area and brings it home on one button.
- Its Linza drone reached version 3.0 this year after eight months of development, with onboard autonomy meant to keep it flying when Russian electronic warfare denies GPS.
- Ukraine's defense ministry said in August that units were using more than 70 AI and computer-vision systems to strike targets, and that it wants every front-line drone so equipped.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision A force built around one pilot per airframe has to decide who it now trains and how many of them it needs, because the job being described is supervision of several machines.
- constraint The companies say the decision to use force is the one boundary that holds, so every accountability question about these systems concentrates on a single human step.
- precedent Ark Robotics' chief executive calls one pilot to many drones a prerequisite. Buyers outside Ukraine will be asked to meet that expectation in their own specifications.
- contradiction Fedorov's forecast of autonomous drones fighting autonomous drones sits awkwardly against the vendors' line that humans still own force decisions, and which of the two a buyer believes changes what it procures.
The part of the operator's job that moved into the aircraft is navigation. Frontline Robotics put what it calls an autonomy layer on the drone itself. "So it can go autonomously to the area of interest, then come back with basically one button," Mykyta Rozhkov, the company's chief business development officer, said [6]. He said a pilot can bring the system home with a push of a button, and the drone works out the shortest way back [7]. Defense technology companies in this market say they are automating tasks while humans stay responsible for decisions about using force [2].
The demand, by Rozhkov's account, came from the users. "Our soldiers are coming to us with a request of: 'How can you provide us with the capability to have different robots controlled by one person?' or 'Can we make a shift of our UAV pilots easier?'" he told Business Insider [5]. Ukrainian firms work with soldiers directly, sometimes talking to them over FaceTime from the front lines [11]. The government's own figure is separate: Ukraine's defense ministry said in August that units were using "more than 70 different systems powered by AI and computer vision technologies to strike enemy targets" [12], and its stated aim is to have 100% of front-line drones carrying computer vision and AI [13].
That figure counts systems. Business Insider describes a progression since Russia's 2022 invasion that ran from one pilot manually flying one drone, to AI helping find targets and holding a course, to one operator overseeing several machines while software takes over when Russian electronic warfare cuts the connection [14]. It does not say how many drones one operator supervises in the field today [20]. Rozhkov's other request is the quieter one. Making a UAV pilot's shift easier is a rostering problem. He said the Linza update puts less "mental demand on a soldier so they can do more stuff", took eight months to develop, and offers "a huge upper hand" [9].
When the link is jammed, the drone has to fly without the operator. Linza 3.0, released this year, was built to keep working when GPS is unavailable because of Russian electronic warfare [8], and Frontline's Zoom reconnaissance drone navigates on AI when it loses satellite signals [10]. Twist Robotics makes hardware and software that let drones navigate and track designated targets when Russia disrupts GPS [19]. A jammed link cannot carry an operator's command. Former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov predicted last month that "we will reach a stage where autonomous drones will fight autonomous drones" [15].
Ark Robotics is aiming further out than that. It is building a system to let thousands of aerial drones and ground robots, including ones it did not make, work together with minimal human intervention, with the operator thousands of kilometers away [17]. Its chief executive, Achi, told Business Insider that the move to a single pilot controlling many drones is "kind of a prerequisite to be successful in the total drone warfare that is coming to all of us" [16], and that "you need these asymmetrical systems that allow you to work with multiple drones at the same time" [18]. This quarter, a unit can buy the one-button return and flight that survives a jammed satellite signal [6][8].
What to watch
- A published operator-to-drone ratio from a Ukrainian unit or manufacturer would make the span-of-control claim measurable.
- Whether Ukraine's defense ministry attaches a date or a budget to its 100% computer-vision target for front-line drones.
- Whether Ark Robotics' system is demonstrated coordinating hardware built by other firms.