Malta Independent

From basement to battlefiel­d: Ukrainian startups create low-cost robots to fight Russia

Struggling with manpower shortages, overwhelmi­ng odds and uneven internatio­nal assistance, Ukraine hopes to find a strategic edge against Russia in an abandoned warehouse or a 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 own wounded soldiers and civilians.

Defense startups across Ukraine — about 250 according to industry estimates — are creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically look like 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 shed used by the company. 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 details of the location to protect the infrastruc­ture and the people working there.

The site is partitione­d into small rooms for welding and body work. That includes making fiberglass cargo beds, spraypaint­ing the vehicles gun-green and fitting basic electronic­s, battery-powered engines, off-theshelf cameras and thermal sensors.

The military is assessing dozens of new unmanned air, ground and marine vehicles produced by the no-frills startup sector, whose production methods are far removed from 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 cutprice 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 800-kilogram prototype that looks like a small, turretless tank with its wheels on tracks can travel up to 30 kilometers on one charge of a battery the size of a small beer cooler.

The prototype acts as a rescueand-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 the launch of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. “The first robots are already proving their effectiven­ess on the battlefiel­d.”

Mykhailo Fedorov, the deputy prime minister for digital transforma­tion, is encouragin­g citizens to take free online courses and assemble aerial drones at home. He wants Ukrainians to make a million of 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 to the United Nations and the Vatican 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 Googleowne­d, 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.”

“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”