The Ukrainian company Swarmer is developing an artificial intelligence-based technology that will allow several dozen drones to be connected to a single network under the control of a single pilot.

Reuters reported on this.

Today, artificial intelligence-based technologies for unmanned systems are being developed in Ukraine in several areas: optical target acquisition systems, navigation programs, and control systems for the so-called “drone swarm.”

One of the two hundred such companies is Swarmer, a startup developing the Styx system. This system is supposed to unite a group of drones into an autonomous network, where the operator will only have to select a target and authorize its destruction.

Styx is designed to control reconnaissance and strike drones. These can be aircraft or ground drones of various ranges.

Serhii Kuprienko, the company’s CEO, said that such a system would increase the scale of drone use. Within its framework, each copter will be able to plan its own actions and predict the behavior of others in the swarm.

He said that while UAV operators try to carry out operations involving more than five drones, artificial intelligence can operate a hundred.

“When you try to increase the scale of an operation [with additional pilots], it just doesn’t work. It’s almost impossible for people to control a swarm of 10 or 20 drones,” Kuprienko says.

Currently, Swarmer technology is still under development. Kuprienko said that an experimental version of the system has already been tested on the battlefield. Company representatives reported that the first test version of Styx can combine 10-15 drones of the same type into a swarm within an hour.

“We cut out some things on purpose, the system is capable of performing complex operations on many drones, but to safely pass the first combat test and pass the decision to the pilots, we hid many things. We made a big red button that triggers several fuses,” recalls Oleksandr Arapov, a company representative. This option makes it possible to save and return the drone home.

It is known that the Swarmer project is being developed with invested funds. The co-founders note that several hundred thousand dollars from three funds have been invested in the development of Styx.

AI on the battlefield

The Ukrainian military already uses elements of artificial intelligence technology on the battlefield. In particular, in the spring of 2024, FPV attack drones with machine vision systems began arriving at the front in large numbers, allowing them to bypass Russian electronic warfare systems.

Maksym Makarchuk, Head of AI at Brave1 Defense Technology Cluster, said that the percentage of FPV drones that hit the target is constantly falling due to the build-up of electronic warfare systems.

According to him, most Ukrainian operators now have a hit rate of about 30-50%, while new pilots can have a hit rate of about 10%. At the same time, he expects that drones with automatic homing will increase this figure to 80%.

“We are already working on the concept that soon there will be no communication between the pilot and the UAV on the front line,” Makarchuk said.

Reuters, citing an unnamed Ukrainian government official, also reported that Ukraine-made strategic strike drones have also begun to be equipped with AI-based navigation systems that do not require GPS signals.