NORTHERN UKRAINE — Struggling with manpower shortages, overwhelming odds and uneven international assistance, Ukraine hopes to find a strategic edge against Russia in an abandoned warehouse or factory basement.
An ecosystem of laboratories in hundreds of secret workshops is leveraging innovation to create a robot army that Ukraine hopes will kill Russian troops and save its wounded soldiers and civilians.
Defense startups across Ukraine — about 250, according to industry estimates — are creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically resemble rural car repair shops.
Employees at a startup run by entrepreneur Andrii Denysenko can put together an unmanned ground vehicle called the Odyssey in four days at a company shed. Its most important feature is the price tag: $35,000, or roughly 10% of the cost of an imported model.
Denysenko asked that The Associated Press not publish location details to protect the infrastructure and the people working there.
The site is partitioned into small rooms for welding and bodywork. This includes making fiberglass cargo beds, spray-painting the vehicles gun-green and fitting basic electronics, battery-powered engines, off-the-shelf cameras and thermal sensors.
The military is assessing dozens of new unmanned air, ground and marine vehicles produced by the no-frills startup sector. These vehicles’ production methods are far removed from those of giant Western defense companies.
A fourth branch of Ukraine’s military — the Unmanned Systems Forces — joined the army, navy and air force in May.
Engineers take inspiration from articles in defense magazines or online videos to produce cut-price platforms. Weapons or smart components can be added later.
“We are fighting a huge country, and they don’t have any resource limits. We understand that we cannot spend a lot of human lives,” said Denysenko, who heads the defense startup UkrPrototyp. “War is mathematics.”
One of its drones, the car-sized Odyssey, spun on its axis and kicked up dust as it rumbled forward in a cornfield in the north of the country last month.
The 1,750-pound prototype that looks like a small, turretless tank with its wheels on tracks can travel up to 18.5 miles on one charge of a battery the size of a small beer cooler.
The prototype acts as a rescue-and-supply platform but can be modified to carry a remotely operated heavy machine gun or sling mine-clearing charges.
“Squads of robots … will become logistics devices, tow trucks, minelayers and deminers, as well as self-destructive robots,” a government fundraising page said after Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces launched. “The first robots are already proving their effectiveness on the battlefield.”
Mykhailo Fedorov, the deputy prime minister for digital transformation, encourages citizens to take free online courses and assemble aerial drones at home. He wants Ukrainians to make a million flying machines a year.
“There will be more of them soon,” the fundraising page said. “Many more.”
Denysenko’s company is working on projects including a motorized exoskeleton that would boost a soldier’s strength and carrier vehicles to transport a soldier’s equipment and even help them up an incline. “We will do everything to make unmanned technologies develop even faster. (Russia’s) murderers use their soldiers as cannon fodder, while we lose our best people,” Fedorov wrote in an online post.
Ukraine has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI, and the combination of low-cost weapons and artificial intelligence tools is worrying many experts who say low-cost drones will enable their proliferation.
Technology leaders worry that the use of drones and AI in weapons could reduce the barrier to killing and dramatically escalate conflicts.
Human Rights Watch and other international rights groups are calling for a ban on weapons that exclude human decision-making, a concern echoed by the U.N. General Assembly, Elon Musk and the founders of the Google-owned, London-based startup DeepMind.
“Cheaper drones will enable their proliferation,” said Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “Their autonomy is also only likely to increase.”
