Serhii Kupriienko, the CEO and co-founder of Swarmer likens an intelligent swarm to a living organism in which drones communicate with each other, decides autonomously how to fly and execute operations.<\/p>\n
In one experimental combat operation last year, the Ukrainian military used Swarmer\u2019s software with a swarm of drones which approached Russian positions and independently determined the moment to launch an attack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAutonomy and automation are the rule,\u201d said Kupriienko. Swarming technology \u201cresponds in real time to new human commands and priorities, changing circumstances and newly discovered information\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
Militaries have already been using swarm tactics to great effect. Russia, for example, has learned to group attacks with its cheap, long range Shahed drones against Ukrainian cities, overwhelming Ukrainian defences and increasing overall hit rates. <\/p>\n
The latest software, however, can make swarming tactics even more deadly, allowing attack drones to learn. There was no real intelligence involved in the \u201ccomms relays\u201d where multiple drones are controlled by a larger drone which relays radio signals to extend the attack range, said Helsing\u2019s Scherf. <\/p>\n
With their massive archive of drone footage which is useful for training artificial intelligence models, Ukrainian defence tech groups believe they have a crucial edge over their foreign rivals. Only Ukrainian companies have access to a classified database of combat drone data known as the Universal Military Dataset. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cDrone swarming has long been treated as an ambitious goal\u201d said Eveline Buchatskiy, managing partner of D3, a venture capital company in Kyiv which invests in military technologies. <\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s \u201cunprecedented volume of combat data available to train autonomy models\u201d were \u201cthe essential building blocks for swarming\u201d, she said. <\/p>\n
Michael Holm of Systematic said the trend for drone makers is run on open software systems which makes them easier to co-ordinate. \u201cWe\u2019re talking weeks, days and weeks, to integrate and make the swarm operational, not years and months.\u201d <\/p>\n
Critics of the AI powered systems warn that the algorithms that run swarms could push the boundaries of human control over weapons, leading to a greater portion of combat decision making handed over to artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n
Fully autonomous weapons in which there is no human input, are restricted under international law.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve of course built autonomy in, but we\u2019ve always made sure that the human is in the loop,\u201d said Scherf. \u201cThis is very much where companies [are] built around European values, and European doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n
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