Struggling with manpower shortages, overwhelming odds and uneven international help, Ukraine hopes to find a strategic edge against Russia in an abandoned warehouse or a factory basement.
An ecosystem of laboratories in hundreds of secret workshops is leveraging innovation to create a robot army that Ukraine hopes will kill Russian troops and save its own wounded soldiers and civilians.
Defence start-ups across Ukraine – about 250 according to industry estimates – are creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically look like rural car repair shops.
Employees at a start-up run by entrepreneur Andrii Denysenko can put together an unstaffed ground vehicle called the Odyssey in four days at a shed used by the company. Its most important feature is the price tag: US$35,000, or roughly 10 per cent of the cost of an imported model.
Denysenko asked that Associated Press not publish details of the location to protect the infrastructure and the people working there.
The site is partitioned into small rooms for welding and body work. That includes making fibreglass cargo beds, spray-painting the vehicles gun-green and fitting basic electronics, battery-powered engines, off-the-shelf cameras and thermal sensors.
The military is assessing dozens of new unstaffed air, ground and marine vehicles produced by the no-frills start-up sector, whose production methods are far removed from giant Western defence companies’.
A fourth branch of Ukraine’s military – the Unmanned Systems Forces – joined the army, navy and air force in May.
Engineers take inspiration from articles in defence magazines or online videos to produce cut-price platforms. Weapons or smart components can be added later.
“We are fighting a huge country, and they don’t have any resource limits. We understand that we cannot spend a lot of human lives,” said Denysenko, who heads the defence start-up UkrPrototyp. “War is mathematics.”
We are fighting a huge country, and they don’t have any resource limits. We understand that we cannot spend a lot of human lives. War is mathematics
One of its drones, the car-sized Odyssey, spun on its axis and kicked up dust as it rumbled forward in a cornfield in the north of the country last month.
The 800kg (1,750 pound) prototype that looks like a small, turretless tank with its wheels on tracks can travel up to 30km (18.5 miles) on one charge of a battery the size of a small beer cooler.
The prototype acts as a rescue-and-supply platform but can be modified to carry a remotely operated heavy machine gun or sling mine-clearing charges.
“Squads of robots … will become logistics devices, tow trucks, minelayers and deminers, as well as self-destructive robots,” a government fundraising page said after the launch of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. “The first robots are already proving their effectiveness on the battlefield.”
Mykhailo Fedorov, the deputy prime minister for digital transformation, is encouraging citizens to take free online courses and assemble aerial drones at home. He wants Ukrainians to make a million of flying machines a year.
“There will be more of them soon,” the fundraising page said. “Many more.”
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Denysenko’s company is working on projects including a motorised exoskeleton that would boost a soldier’s strength and carrier vehicles to transport a soldier’s equipment and even help them up an incline.
“We will do everything to make unstaffed technologies develop even faster. (Russia’s) murderers use their soldiers as cannon fodder, while we lose our best people,” Fedorov wrote in an online post.
Ukraine has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI and the combination of low-cost weapons and artificial intelligence tools is worrying many experts who say low-cost drones will enable their proliferation.
Technology leaders to the United Nations and the Vatican worry that the use of drones and AI in weapons could reduce the barrier to killing and dramatically escalate conflicts.
Human Rights Watch and other international rights groups are calling for a ban on weapons that exclude human decision making, a concern echoed by the UN General Assembly, Elon Musk and the founders of the Google-owned, London-based start-up DeepMind.
“Cheaper drones will enable their proliferation,” said Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “Their autonomy is also only likely to increase.”
