Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence are now finding and attacking targets without human assistance, 快猫短视频 has learned, in what would be the first confirmed use of autonomous weapons or 鈥渒iller robots鈥�. While the drones are designed to target vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry, it is almost certain that the resulting explosions are killing Russian soldiers without a direct command from a human operator, although no casualties have been confirmed.
The drone is a quadcopter called the Saker Scout, which and which can carry 3 kilograms of bombs to a range of around 12 kilometres. Small drones operated by remote control have proved extremely effective as bombers during the Russia-Ukraine war, dropping munitions made from modified anti-tank grenades. Larger drone-dropped munitions, as carried by the Saker Scout, will destroy even heavy tanks.
Saker is a Ukrainian company founded in 2021 with the goal of producing affordable AI for small business, in particular drone-based vision systems for applications including crop protection. When Russia invaded, the company switched to assisting the military. Its AI vision software can recognise 64 different types of 鈥渕ilitary object鈥�, including tanks, personnel carriers and other hardware, according to a spokesperson for the company.
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Like other drones in use in Ukraine, the Saker Scout can be flown manually by a human operator. In this case, the AI points out targets and can spot and verify the nature of a target before striking it. It is integrated with Ukraine鈥檚 Delta intelligence distribution system, which gathers data from drones, satellites and other sources to produce a complete map of the battlefield.
The drone also has two autonomous modes. It can be sent into an area on its own to reconnoitre or it can be instructed to find and attack targets autonomously. The spokesperson told 快猫短视频 that the Saker Scout had already been used in this latter mode on a small scale, confirming the use of autonomous weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Using the drone in autonomous mode is less reliable than having a human in the loop, the spokesperson said, but they claimed the AI had proved effective and it was more important to deploy a weapon that worked now rather than waiting until it was perfect. Ultimately, Ukraine will need large numbers of drones that can operate autonomously, locating and striking targets at machine speed, the spokesperson said.
The potential use of autonomous weapons in Ukraine has been discussed for some time. Earlier this year, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine鈥檚 minister for digital transformation, stated that autonomous weapons were a 鈥溾�� next step in drone development.
at think tank the Center for a New American Security says the basic technology is readily available. 鈥淚mage classifiers have been around for at least 10 years and this type of software can be downloaded easily and trained on suitable data,鈥� says Scharre. 鈥淏ut building a crude demonstration is one thing, the question is how much operational value such a system will have.鈥�
In particular, Scharre notes the autonomous drone is likely to generate 鈥渇alse positives鈥� in which an object is incorrectly identified as a target.
鈥淭he systems demonstrated so far have some degree of false positives, which is to be expected,鈥� says Scharre. 鈥淗umans are naturally quite good at object recognition, so these AI tools are most likely to be used in situations where they are necessary 鈥� for example, where the communications link is jammed, or where there鈥檚 a risk the drone operator could be targeted.鈥�
The UN has been discussing or killer robots for many years and numerous campaign groups want to see them banned. A 2021 UN report claimed autonomous attack drones were used in Libya in 2020, but this was never proven. There are currently no specific laws covering autonomous weapons.
鈥淎 central feature of the debate has been the ability of such weapons to comply with the law of war and avoid civilian casualties,鈥� says Scharre. 鈥淚f we see Ukraine beginning to deploy autonomous weapons in a way that is effective, avoids civilian casualties and hits military targets, it may be hard to object. But there is a very real risk that this could lead to indiscriminate use of such weapons later on.鈥�
