While Struggling with manpower shortages, seemingly insurmountable odds and inconsistent international aid, Ukraine hopes to find a strategic advantage against Russia in abandoned warehouses and basements and factories.
An ecosystem of labs in hundreds of secret workshops is using innovation to create an army of robots that Ukraine hopes will kill Russian soldiers and rescue its wounded soldiers and citizens.
Defense startups in Ukraine – according to industry estimates around 250 – create killing machines in secret locations that usually look like rural garages.
In a hangar used by the company, workers at a startup run by Andriy Denisenko can assemble an unmanned vehicle called “Odyssey” for four days. Its most important feature is its price: $35,000, or roughly 10% of the cost of an imported model. Denisenko asked The Associated Press not to publish details about the startup's location in order to protect the infrastructure and the people working there.
The place is divided into small rooms for welding and body assembly. Production includes making fiberglass cargo beds, painting the vehicles camouflage green, and fitting basic electronics, battery-powered motors, cameras, and thermal sensors.
The army is being supplied with dozens of new unmanned air, land and sea vehicles produced by the startup sector, whose production methods are a far cry from giant Western defense companies.
Fourth branch of the Ukrainian army – the forces of unmanned systems – joined the Army, Navy and Air Force in May.
Engineers take inspiration from defense magazine articles or online videos to produce low-cost platforms. Weapons or smart components can be added to them at a later stage.
„We are fighting against a big country and they have no resource limitations. We understand that we cannot sacrifice so many human lives”, said Denisenko, who heads the startup “UkrPrototype“ (UkrPrototyp). "War is mathematics," he added.
One of his drones, the car-sized “Odyssey”, spun on its axles and kicked up dust as it roared forward in a cornfield in the north of the country last month.
The eight-hundred-kilogram prototype, which looks like a small, domeless tank with chain wheels, can travel up to 30 km on a single charge on its battery, which is the size of a small beer cooler.
The prototype acts as a rescue and supply platform, but can be modified to remotely operate heavy machine guns or mine clearance charges.
„Robotic squads will be used as logistics units, tugboats, minesweepers and demining machines, as well as self-destructing robots,”, according to the government's fundraising page after the deployment of the unmanned systems force. “The first robots are already proving their effectiveness on the battlefield.“
Mykhailo Fyodorov, deputy prime minister for digital transformation, encouraged citizens to complete free online courses and assemble drones at home. He wants the Ukrainians to produce millions of flying machines a year.
„There will be many of them soon,”, says the donation page. “Much more.“
Denisenko's company is working on projects including a motorized exoskeleton that boosts soldiers' strength and vehicles to transport their equipment, even helping them climb slopes. “We will do everything to develop unmanned technologies even faster. (Russian) killers use their soldiers as cannon ammunition while we lose our best men,”, Fyodorov wrote in an online post.
Ukraine has semi-autonomous drones and counter-drone weapons equipped with artificial intelligence, and the combination of low-cost drones will enable their proliferation.
Technology leaders at the United Nations and the Vatican fear that the use of drones and artificial intelligence in weapons could lower the barrier to killing and dramatically escalate conflicts.
„Human Rights Watch“ and other international human rights groups have called for a ban on weapons that exclude human decision-making. This concern was expressed by the UN General Assembly, Elon Musk and the founders of the London-based startup “DeepMind“ (DeepMind), owned by “Google”.
„The cheaper cost of drones will allow them to spread,” said Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “Their autonomy is also likely to continue to increase,”, he added.
Translation from English by Valeria Dinkova, BTA