Deep Dive: Ukrainian drone swarm concepts

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Drone swarms are a natural evolution of the fierce technological innovation happening on the Ukrainian battlefield. 

Quadcopters have almost reached the peak of their development, said Mykola Havryliuk, cofounder of Ukrainian drone company Sparrow Avia, which produces bombers. Just two years ago a quadcopter’s flight range was five to seven km, but now it's up to 25 km, he said. 

With range squeezed nearly to the maximum, swarms will be the next stage, Havryliuk predicts. 

Now, Ukrainian companies seem to be at the final stage of development and are already testing drone swarms on the battlefield. 

What is a swarm?

The term ‘swarm drone’ is often misused. Ten pilots controlling ten drones doesn’t count as swarm technology, even if the drones visually resemble a swarm. A real swarm is when one person launches more drones than they can fly at once, which then communicate with each other, explained Havryliuk.

Very often thousands of Chinese drones are used in light shows as an example of swarms. In fact, these drones don’t act like a real swarm. They are programmed separately and don't communicate with each other, says Ukrainian founder Serhii Kuprienko. As a former Amazon engineer and AI-specialist, he started the US-based company Swarmer, which develops swarm technology.

“I strongly believe that swarms will reduce the number of people involved in the battlefield. The one who first masters it will win this war and the nearest future war,” he told Counteroffensive.Pro.

Also, swarms powered by AI may make it easier for pilots to control drones. 

Havruliuk from Sparrow Avia gives an example: right now, it is hard for pilots to navigate and maneuver drones between trees in the forest due to the radio horizon — especially under the threat of Electronic Warfare when the video constantly disappears due to obstacles and enemy interference.

But these new swarms may be able to orient themselves independently and reconfigure their routes, taking obstacles into account.

Who develops swarms?

At least three Ukrainian companies develop swarm drones: Ukrainian (but US-based) startup Swarmer, Ukrainian-Danish firm Dropla, and Ukrainian product company Sine Engineering. 

The latter develops not the whole drones, but components which enable swarm capabilities and may be used in other companies' drones, explained its CEO Andriy Chulyk. For example, Swarmer uses technology developed by Sine Engineering in its drones. These companies have even cooperated in the production of FPV swarms.

Swarmer is currently the most public and well-known in the media. Its CEO Kupiernko explains that he has a personal reason for being public and developing the technology which is more important to him than making money: as a Ukrainian and a father of three teenagers, he wants to develop and scale swarms as quickly as possible, to change the course of the war. 

“I am ready to talk about our work and transfer the experience to other companies, even if we will lose some profit or company worth as a result of it,” he said.

Kuprienko has been developing Swarmer since 2023. First, his crew worked with large hexacopters on swarms in Kuprienko's garage. 

Later they moved to an office and raised solid financial support. In September 2024 Swarmer raised $2.7 million, mainly from US-based R-G.AI, but also from Radius Capital, Green Flag Ventures and D3. 

This money will be spent on new drones, technology refinement and team expansion. Now around 30 people work on Swarmer, but Kuprienko wants to double this number to speed up development. Mainly he will hire engineers, but also wants to bring on specialists who will be responsible for quality control.

A few other Ukrainian companies are also developing swarm technology, says Kuprienko. In particular, similar technology is being developed by Sine Engineering. But none of theirs are on the battlefield yet.  

Meanwhile, Russia also understands that swarm drones are the next level of UAV evolution, said Havruliuk.

Russian officials have announced that swarm technology has been implemented in their Lancet loitering munition. It may be real, but hasn't been officially spotted by Ukraine yet, said Kuprienko.  

The ability to test this cutting edge technology on the battlefield is critical to its development, said Havryliuk. The race to equip their troops means that Ukraine and Russia will likely be world pioneers in this cutting edge technology..

How do these swarm drones work?

Swarmer drones act like an orchestra. Everything starts on the ground, where the operator can launch different types of drones: small kamikaze quadcopters, big hexacopters, bombers and fixed-wing UAVs. 

Theoretically, there may be up to 690 drones in a Swarmer swarm, but it makes the most sense to use five to 15 drones in one squad, said Kuprienko. One of them is used as a recon drone that transmits video to the operator. The operator opens a digital map of the battlefield where the drones are set to fly. Then drones then take off and fly to the zone via different paths. 

“Visually, they may not look like a swarm,” Kuprienko laughs, pointing out that they travel independently to avoid bundling together.

As they travel, the drones are constantly communicating with each other, exchanging views from their cameras to navigate terrain. 

Drones rarely hang in the air in one place — they constantly move so as not to be hit. They have an onboard algorithm that prevents collisions and makes them maintain a distance between each other.

When the drones are in place, their cameras start to scan territory, seeking targets. The operator then receives the video with marked potential targets. From there, he can command swarm to attack one of them. 

Here the job of the operator is done: drones decide between themselves who will attack the target. 

To make this decision, drones exchange data about distance to the target, battery capacity, and their different munitions. Drones will continue to attack the selected target until it is destroyed. Still, the operator has a big red button to cancel the command if something goes wrong.

“There is no guarantee of avoiding friendly fire. The drone cannot recognize [whether] the target [is] the real enemy. That is why drones still are the instrument — the planning and scouting remain the most important thing,” Kuprienko explained.

The operator ultimately sends the command to attack. But Kuprienko is sure: the need for efficiency on the battlefield will require that humans cede more and more decision-making power to the machine.

“This is the first war ever in which we have to hand over decision-making to the machines. The atomic bomb was dropped by people, and even now drones attack after people's commands. But we need to give this decision to machines. Of course, the question is how not to kill ourselves. But we can't pretend that this technology doesn't exist,” said Kuprienko.

Sine Engineering is also developing technology that works with 15 copters and fixed-winged drones. It may involve several pilots for a swarm of drones, however, said CEO Andriy Chulyk. He declined to tell us more about the other details of the company’s tech.

Swarm drones can also be ground-based. They are being used for mine detection technology developed by Ukrainian-Danish startup Dropla, which has already raised money from Denmark's drone cluster Odense Robotics. The Dropla crew trained its neural network on 300 different bombs and mines – and thousands of images. 

Dropla uses swarms of six drones (for example, four air drones and two land drones), and every day they can process a mined area of ​​500 000* square meters.

First, an operator launches several copters, equipped with seven optical, magnetic and electromagnetic sensors to detect bombs. They communicate with each other as they fly to the field, which they scan and send all data to a command and control platform. 

Then the platform creates a digital map of the field where all bombs and mines are shown. When the map is ready and all mines are visible, the land drones with attachments are put into action. 

These land drones move close to the mines to create safe routes for sappers, cutting vegetation so that the mines can be more easily found. It lets deminers focus their resources on demining land that is actually contaminated, said the company.

For these specialists Dropla developed artificial reality glasses that let them see all mines on the field. Still, drones may not see all mines, so Dropla’s land drones are made to withstand three to five explosions.

Co-founder and CEO of Dropla V’yacheslav Shvaydak thinks that his solution will make demining at least ten times cheaper than it is now. According to him, the current cost of one demined square meter is one to three euros, but AI and robots may lower it to just ten cents. In addition, this form of demining is around six times faster than the work of sappers, or big specialiased vehicles. 

Can swarms defeat EW challenges?

Despite swarm technology being talked about for many years, many global defense companies still can’t perfect it, said Andriy Chulyk, co-founder of Sine Engineering.

As well as the technical difficulty of making drones communicate and navigate autonomously, a major challenge is operating in an EW environment, when the enemy is trying to sabotage your weapons.

“There is no place on the battlefield where the EW is not active. If Russian EW does not work in this area, then Ukrainian EW definitely does,” said Kuprienko. 

Kuprienko and Swarmer seem to have found a solution: not using a GPS signal at all. Swarmer drones run to the target based on its camera's data and talk with each other through EW-resistant communications.

“It is impossible to suppress via EW a signal that one drone transmits to another at a distance of 10 meters. There [would need to] be kilowatts of EW power to do so,” said Havryliuk. 

Swarmer drones are designed to be able to fly under constant EW, even if some of the connection between drones disappears. In this case they still can operate as a group. 

“The operator has a connection only once per minute and cannot change the command during this interval. Obviously the technology is not perfect. Therefore, the [key] is competent planning and scouting,” emphasized Kuprienko. 

There is no absolute protection from EW, Kuprienko admits. And these intelligent drones are not invulnerable. For example, they can't respond if they are being shot at. The drones still can't understand when it is being shot at, and so this fact would not change its decision-making.

When swarms will appear on the battlefield?

The first massive use of swarm drones will appear within the next few months, predicts Havryluik. Swarmer may be the first of them. 

Over the spring, a swarm of three Swarmer big copters powered by AI were tested on the battlefield. Kuprienko remembers this moment perfectly: he was in a rush with work, but suddenly a soldier who operated his drones called him. The soldier said: 

“Serhii, everything works, we just need more.” 

“What does it mean ‘everything works’?!”

Kuprienko expected that many changes and fixes would be ahead.

Instead he managed to confirm the viability of autonomous swarms in real-world conditions for the first time. He expects to test small swarm copters on the battlefield in November. 

Sine Engineering swarms have also already been tested, but only on the test site. Now the company is preparing for tests in combat conditions — their technology is close to being finished, said Andriy Chulyk, CEO at Sine Engineering.

In August 2024 Ukrainian rescuers and the Special Transport Service of Ukraine began testing of Dropla ground drones. Their combined swarms of air and land drones are being prepared for tests in February 2025. 

*The data on the mined area processed by Dropla drones each day was clarified after publication.

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