Ukraine is inching towards robot-on-robot fighting

UGVs are already rolling around the front lines, with the 3rd Assault Brigade among the pioneers. They have not yet appeared in large numbers, though that moment may be near. In spring Ukraine announced plans to deploy 15,000 ground robots. Some key players predict that the face of the battlefield will rapidly change this summer, likening the proliferation of UGVs to the explosion in aerial-drone manufacturing in 2023. 

“We don’t have the men to counteract Russia’s meat-wave," says one manufacturer. “So we’ll send our own zombies against theirs."

There are currently about 40 mostly private Ukrainian firms producing some 200 UGV models. They fall into three tribes: logistics (petrol, water, evacuation); engineering support (mine-laying, mine-sweeping, communications); and, to a lesser extent, combat-support roles (platforms with grenade launchers, drone-hunting turrets). Most UGVs are beefed up before being deployed to front-line roles, with brigades typically adding cameras, extra comms or electronic-warfare protection. 

The war’s widening “grey zone"—10km of ground either side of the contact line, watched and punished by drones—is spurring demand for the most robust robots that let men stay underground.

“Stark", who runs the Kill House’s “UGV Academy"—a university for ground robots—says machines are already substituting for squads of soldiers in particular scenarios. Mule drones can transport tonnes of materiel to the lines. New evacuation drones like the Ardal can spare stretcher teams from becoming sitting ducks under drone-heavy skies. The latest mine-layers can lay dozens of anti-tank mines in a single run, a task that once required sappers to be sent out, over and over again. The Hyzhak (“Predator") uses artificial intelligence to identify and shoot drones out of the sky from 200 metres away. Its brother, the Liut (“Fury" ), a 7.62mm machine-gun platform, first bared its teeth in an ambush operation during Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk last August. Vasyl, the founder of UGV Robotics, which produces the Liut, says the Russians were so surprised by the novelty that they immediately gave their positions away, letting other Ukrainian units target them.

In the early days the UGV operators needed to be close to their prototypes to stay in range, often no more than a kilometre away. “Shadow" and “Shura", members of another brigade using UGVs, the 92nd, recall a time when they had to accompany their vehicle by foot to the front, a task that would be suicidal today because of Russian drones. 

Today, they can connect to them via Starlink from swivel chairs in command posts far from the front-line positions in the Kharkiv region. 

“We can control the vehicle with the full situation mapped out on screens in front of us," says Shadow. “One of us can be piloting, the other drinking Coca-cola or on a smoke break." But the operators do not foresee an era of robot-on-robot warfare just yet. Ground robots are some way from replacing infantry, they say. “I think they will obviously support logistics, to help here and there, yes," says Shura. “But never to replace infantry."

The most immediate brake on mass deployment is communications. Starlink fails in difficult terrain or beneath trees. Mesh networks, where drones connect to each other to give data multiple paths to travel, can collapse if crucial nodes are lost. Viktor, an engineer of the Burevii design-and-production bureau, which makes UGVs used for logistics and kamikaze attacks, says the current technology probably needs an AI or machine-vision upgrade before mass use in active combat becomes realistic. That could be a year away. 

Another factor limiting a UGV revolution will be the availability of skilled operators, he says. “We have very few who have completed enough missions and are still alive."

Ukraine is winning in the UGV race at the moment—largely because it has to. The Kremlin, whose army is increasing by 8,000-9,000 men per month, probably does not feel anything like the same imperative. Equally, there is nothing to say that Russian UGV drone development will not go the same way as the first-person-view drone market before it. 

That is to say, Ukraine’s innovation ecosystem opens up the technology, before Russia’s industrial system copies, standardises and scales up on the best of it. But even though Ukraine’s UGV developers acknowledge that the best of their creations will eventually be copied, they say even a modest shift can have real meaning. “It will be a success if we replace 1% of our manpower needs on the front," says Vasyl. “And I think right now we can do quite a bit better than 1%."

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