US company’s AI lets Ukraine’s cheap kamikaze drones track targets on their own - Ars Technica
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Ukrainian drone operators have destroyed many Russian armored vehicles on the ground and even military helicopters in midair using $400 Shrike drones with explosive payloads. Now thousands of such drones are getting upgraded with an AI system capable of autonomously tracking and homing in on moving targets.
In mid-July, the Ukrainian military began receiving Shrike drones made by the Ukrainian company SkyFall equipped with AI-powered autonomy hardware and software developed by the US company Auterion. The companies plan to deliver 50,000 drones equipped with Auterion’s Skynode S strike kits in the coming months.
That allows human operators to manually fly the Shrike first-person view (FPV) drones into a battlefield area, designate a target up to half a mile away and then “flip the switch to turn it into fire-and-forget terminal guidance mode,” Lorenz Meier, co-founder and CEO of Auterion, told Ars.
The operator can abort a strike or choose a different target as long as they have a radio signal connection with the drone, Meier explained. But the drone can still automatically track and fly into targets without any human guidance, even if it loses its connection with the operator due to buildings or terrain blocking the signal or because of enemy jamming on the same radio frequencies.
To home in on targets, Auterion’s software relies solely on the visual information available from the Shrike drone’s main onboard camera. That means the Shrike drones can track and strike moving targets without any reliance on GPS—a crucial advantage on modern battlefields where GPS jamming has also become common.
That could further enhance the success rate of remotely piloted Shrike drones that have already struck many vehicle-size targets since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including armored tanks, electronic warfare systems, artillery guns, and rocket launchers. Shrike drones have reportedly taken down two Russian Mi-28 helicopters, each worth as much as $19 million, according to the Kyiv Independent.
Cost-effective AI for battlefield drones
Until now, the Ukrainian military has mainly relied on human operators to manually guide drones toward their targets, with the exception of mid- or long-range strike drones such as the $5,000 AI-powered “Hornet” drones developed by the California-based company Perennial Autonomy founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Those drones often fly far beyond the frontlines to target Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure, factories and warehouses, or even ships in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
But Auterion focused on creating AI-powered capabilities for the cheaper, shorter-range FPV drones that have become the most common weapons responsible for killing or wounding soldiers on the frontlines in Ukraine. The company developed a tightly integrated flight control system and terminal guidance system optimized to run on a Western-made Arm system-on-a-chip costing just $18.
“What we are doing is replacing the existing flight controller—which has no computer, no AI—with avionics that has a microprocessor unit, has AI on board, and can track into the target fully autonomously,” Meier told Ars.
Each of SkyFall’s Shrike drones equipped with such capability costs about $2,000, compared to the $400 Ukrainian drones that rely only on manual piloting, Meier wrote in a blog post.
By comparison, he described Western militaries as still purchasing “precision munitions at six or seven figures per shot (30–60 times this price), drones procured in batches of dozens, priced like exquisite aircraft, delivered on timelines measured in years.”
The 50,000 Shrike drones equipped with Auterion’s strike kit were funded by a $100 million contract backed by an officially unnamed European country. Reuters reported that Germany is the country funding the order, and Meier also disclosed that Auterion’s team based in Munich, Germany, is fulfilling the order.
This is the largest delivery order to date for Auterion. But the company also previously committed to delivering 33,000 drone strike kits to Ukraine in July 2025, with backing from a $50 million Pentagon contract.
A Shrike FPV drone manufactured by the Ukrainian company SkyFall that can be equipped with Auterion’s AI-powered drone strike kit.
Credit:<br>Auterion | SkyFall
A Shrike FPV drone manufactured by the Ukrainian company SkyFall that can be equipped with Auterion’s AI-powered...