A Ukrainian soldier preparing an automated weapon with a gun turret mounted on a rolling drone for a test at a shooting range near Kyiv. The weapon was developed by Roboneers, a Ukrainian company. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
IN a field on the outskirts of Kyiv, the founders of Vyriy, a Ukrainian drone company, were at work on a weapon of the future.
To demonstrate it, Oleksii Babenko, 25, Vyriy’s CEO, hopped on his motorcycle and rode down a dirt path. Behind him, a drone followed, as a colleague tracked the movements from a briefcase-size computer.
Until recently, a human would have piloted the quadcopter. No longer. Instead, after the drone locked onto its target – Babenko – it flew itself, guided by software that used the machine’s camera to track him.
The motorcycle’s growling engine was no match for the silent drone as it stalked Babenko.
“Push, push more. Pedal to the metal, man,” his colleagues called out over a walkie-talkie as the drone swooped toward him. “You’re screwed, screwed!”
If the drone had been armed with explosives, and if his colleagues hadn’t disengaged the autonomous tracking, Babenko would have been a goner.
Vyriy is just one of many Ukrainian companies working on a major leap forward in the weaponisation of consumer technology, driven by the war with Russia. The pressure to out-think the enemy, along with huge flows of investment, donations and government contracts, has turned Ukraine into a Silicon Valley for autonomous drones and other weaponry.
What the companies are creating is technology that makes human judgment about targeting and firing increasingly tangential.
The widespread availability of off-the-shelf devices, easy-to-design software, powerful automation algorithms and specialised artificial intelligence microchips has pushed a deadly innovation race into uncharted territory, fuelling a potential new era of killer robots.
An employee of Vyriy using goggles to see what a drone is seeing as it locks onto a target during a test flight in a field on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine. Vyriy is one of many Ukrainian companies driven by the war with Russia to work on the weaponisation of consumer technology. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
The most advanced versions of the technology that allows drones and other machines to act autonomously have been made possible by deep learning, a form of AI that uses large amounts of data to identify patterns and make decisions.
Deep learning has helped generate popular large language models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, but it also helps make models interpret and respond in real time to video and camera footage. That means software that once helped a drone follow a snowboarder down a mountain can now become a deadly tool.
In more than a dozen interviews with Ukrainian entrepreneurs, engineers and military units, a picture emerged of a near future when swarms of self-guided drones can coordinate attacks and machine guns with computer vision can automatically shoot down soldiers.
More outlandish creations, like a hovering unmanned copter that wields machine guns, are also being developed.
The weapons are cruder than the slick stuff of science-fiction blockbusters, like The Terminator and its T-1000 liquid-metal assassin, but they are a step toward such a future.
While these weapons aren’t as advanced as expensive military-grade systems made by the United States, China and Russia, what makes the developments significant is their low cost – just thousands of dollars or less – and ready availability.
Except for the munitions, many of these weapons are built with code found online and components such as hobbyist computers, like Raspberry Pi, that can be bought from Best Buy and a hardware store. Some US officials said they worried that the abilities could soon be used to carry out terrorist attacks.
For Ukraine, the technologies could provide an edge against Russia, which is also developing autonomous killer gadgets – or simply help it keep pace.
The systems raise the stakes in an international debate about the ethical and legal ramifications of AI on the battlefield. Human rights groups and UN officials want to limit the use of autonomous weapons for fear that they may trigger a new global arms race that could spiral out of control.
A drone is being tested by Vyriy in a field on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.— ©2024 The New York Times Company
In Ukraine, such concerns are secondary to fighting off an invader.
“We need maximum automation,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, who has led the country’s efforts to use tech startups to expand advanced fighting capabilities. “These technologies are fundamental to our victory.”
Autonomous drones like Vyriy’s have already been used in combat to hit Russian targets, according to Ukrainian officials and video verified by The New York Times. Fedorov said the government was working to fund drone companies to help them rapidly scale up production.
Major questions loom about what level of automation is acceptable. For now, the drones require a pilot to lock onto a target, keeping a “human in the loop” – a phrase often invoked by policymakers and AI ethicists.
Ukrainian soldiers have raised concerns about the potential for malfunctioning autonomous drones to hit their own forces. In the future, constraints on such weapons may not exist.
Ukraine has “made the logic brutally clear of why autonomous weapons have advantages,” said Stuart Russell, an AI scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has warned about the dangers of weaponised AI. “There will be weapons of mass destruction that are cheap, scalable and easily available in arms markets all over the world.”
A drone Silicon Valley
In a ramshackle workshop in an apartment building in eastern Ukraine, Dev, a 28-year-old soldier in the 92nd Assault Brigade, has helped push innovations that turned cheap drones into weapons. First, he strapped bombs to racing drones, then added larger batteries to help them fly farther and recently incorporated night vision so the machines can hunt in the dark.
In May, he was one of the first to use autonomous drones, including those from Vyriy. While some required improvements, Dev said, he believed that they would be the next big technological jump to hit the front lines.
Autonomous drones are “already in high demand,” he said. The machines have been especially helpful against jamming that can break communications links between drone and pilot. With the drone flying itself, a pilot can simply lock onto a target and let the device do the rest.
Drones are assembled at the Kyiv office of PG Robotics. PG Robotics is one of several drone companies working on automated targeting. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
Makeshift factories and labs have sprung up across Ukraine to build remote-controlled machines of all sizes, from long-range aircraft and attack boats to cheap kamikaze drones – abbreviated as FPVs, for first-person view, because they are guided by a pilot wearing virtual-reality-like goggles that give a view from the drone.
Many are precursors to machines that will eventually act on their own.
Efforts to automate FPV flights began last year, but were slowed by setbacks building flight control software, according to Fedorov, who said those problems had been resolved. The next step was to scale the technology with more government spending, he said, adding that about 10 companies were already making autonomous drones.
“We already have systems which can be mass-produced, and they’re now extensively tested on the front lines, which means they’re already actively used,” Fedorov said.
A miniaturised war
On a hot afternoon last month in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas, Yurii Klontsak, a 23-year-old reservist, trained four soldiers to use the latest futuristic weapon: a gun turret with autonomous targeting that works with a PlayStation controller and a tablet.
Speaking over booms of nearby shelling, Klontsak explained how the gun, called Wolly after a resemblance to the Pixar robot WALL-E, can auto-lock on a target up to 1km away and jump between pre-programmed positions to quickly cover a broad area.
The company making the weapon, DevDroid, was also developing an auto-aim to track and hit moving targets.
“When I first saw the gun, I was fascinated,” Klontsak said. “I understood this was the only way, if not to win this war, then to at least hold our positions.”
The gun is one of several that have emerged on the front lines using AI-trained software to automatically track and shoot targets. Not dissimilar to the object identification featured in surveillance cameras, software on a screen surrounds humans and other would-be targets with a digital box. All that’s left for the shooter to do is remotely pull the trigger with a video game controller.
For now, the gunmakers say they do not allow the machine gun to fire without a human pressing a button. But they also said it would be easy to make one that could.
Many of Ukraine’s innovations are being developed to counter Russia’s advancing weaponry. Ukrainian soldiers operating machine guns are a prime target for Russian drone attacks.
With robot weapons, no human dies when a machine gun is hit. New algorithms, still under development, could eventually help the guns shoot Russian drones out of the sky.
Often, battlefield demands pull together engineers and soldiers.
Oleksandr Yabchanka, a commander in Da Vinci Wolves, a battalion known for its innovation in weaponry, recalled how the need to defend the “road of life” – a route used to supply troops fighting Russians along the eastern front line in Bakhmut – had spurred invention.
Imagining a solution, he posted an open request on Facebook for a computerised, remote-controlled machine gun.
In several months, Yabchanka had a working prototype from a firm called Roboneers. The gun was almost instantly helpful for his unit.
“We could sit in the trench drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and shoot at the Russians,” he said. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
