Ground Robots Inherit the Kill Zone
Borys Drozhak has a vision: a frontline almost free of humans, patrolled by flying drones and ground robots, and continuously monitored by AI-controlled sensor networks. And it’s not a pipe dream. Ukrainian roboticists have made major strides in that direction over the past four years. Remotely controlled ground vehicles fitted with machine guns and grenade launchers now patrol the no-man’s land straddling the front, part of a robotic legion that has stymied Russia’s territorial ambitions so far this year.Drozhak is a co-founder and CEO of RoverTech, which manufactures the Zmyi, one of Ukraine’s most successful ground robots. Zmyi, Ukrainian for snake, is an 800-kilogram (1,700-pound) rover, 2.15 by 1.5 meters in size, with 75-centimeter diameter wheels. The Zmyi comes in various configurations—for demining, logistics, fighting fires, firing a machine gun, or launching grenades. According to Drozhak, the UGV is a record-breaker among Ukrainian ground robots. It’s engineered to be nearly noiseless and emit as little heat as possible, helping it to elude Russia’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) drones. As a result, a Zmyi rover completes on average 57 missions across the kill zone before being destroyed. The kill zone is the roughly 35-kilometer-wide swath of land that straddles the front line; its width is variable and determined mainly by the growing range of the drones.“Usually, a UGV [uncrewed ground vehicle] on the battlefield lasts about seven missions,” Drozhak says. “The Zmyi is quite a bit bigger and stronger” in comparison with most other UGVs, “and can make it back even if two of its wheels get destroyed.”Drozhak is a software engineer turned roboticist whose story is echoed everywhere in the Ukrainian defense establishment. Before the Russian invasion, he was living a quiet life in Ireland, working for an international software development firm. He returned home shortly after the war began to help defend his homeland. Together with his friend, Vasyl Korenovskyi, who had been a mining engineer, he founded RoverTech with the goal of building robots to perform some of the most dangerous tasks in the war zone. In 2023, they rolled out their first product–the Zmyi de-miner. Earlier this year, one of RoverTech’s assault UGVs was part of a widely reported operation that forced a group of Russian soldiers to surrender without the presence of any Ukrainian troops. Such feats, Drozhak insists, are not rare on Ukrainian battlefields these days.UGVs are the latest chapter in the mil-tech race spurred by the war in Ukraine. Scores of Ukrainian start-ups have developed dozens of different small ground robots, each with typically multiple variants, over the past three years. They’re mostly replacing human-driven tanks and other military vehicles that used to criss-cross the war zone. These remotely controlled robotic vehicles cost a few tens of thousands of dollars apiece compared to millions for a traditional tank, and they can be tweaked and modified in front-line workshops to serve the most urgent needs. Zelenskyy Orders Up 50,000 More UGVsIn April, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed an order for the government to procure 50,000 UGVs for Ukraine’s military forces by the end of 2026. That’s more than three times as many as the government purchased in 2025, and a massive increase from the 2,000 procured in 2024, according to defense analyst Marc C. Lange.The rise of UGVs, Lange explains, is a direct response to the war-fighting revolution ushered in by the speedy evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles that came to define the war in Ukraine.As the number of drones zooming above the frontline rose and their range increased, the battle field became completely transparent. Today, anything that enters the kill zone gets hit by a first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drone within minutes.“Any armored formation, any resupply and logistics vehicle, and any manned formation anywhere near the edge of the battle area has between seconds to a low amount of minutes before it gets turned to dust,” says Lange. “The Ukrainians were losing drivers. Traditional methods of evacuating injured soldiers became impossible. That space is basically unsurvivable.”Ukraine, suffering from a shortage of infantry, has taken that problem more seriously than Russia, which has a larger pool of fresh recruits to draw from. UGVs began ferrying supplies to troops at frontline positions in 2024. Gradually, they took over the complex and risky evacuations of the wounded, using special enclosures to protect the soldier being transported. But this year, Lange says, is “the year of the assault UGV.”Emerging Ukrainian tactics combine UGVs with real-time reconnaissance and surveillance from aerial drones, which discover enemy troops, often under cover of night. The reconnaissance data are then used by remote operators who guide UGVs as they stalk, corner, and shoot to kill. Oleg Fedoryshyn, the head of research and design at DevDroid, another prominent Ukrainian UGV developer, said the ground robots can be controlled from as far as 100 kilometers away using Starlink connectivity, LTE networks, or mesh-networked military radio systems. The UGVs can also carry strike UAVs, serve as communication relays for drones, or carry and launch communication relay drones that further extend the range of the attack vehicles. The UGV can lurk in position for up to one week without needing a battery charge, Fedoroshyn said, and wait for the enemy to move closer.“It’s better than to put people there,” he notes. “A guy with a machine gun is always the first target for the enemy.” The Droid TW 12.7, by DevDroid, is shown here outfitted with a .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun that can be aimed and fired by a remote operator using a tablet and an encrypted communications link.DevDroidFedoroshyn estimates that UGVs could eventually help cut the number of soldiers needed along the frontline by 30 to 40 percent. Drozhak is even more ambitious. He envisions a future front line that’s entirely automated, relying on sensors and other systems that are only occasionally serviced by humans.A guy with a machine gun is always the first target for the enemy.“Right now, we need a lot of UGVs because there are people on the front line and we need to deliver supplies to them,” he says. “But we can substitute many of them with sensor systems, servicing robots, and UGVs, and then we will not need that many for logistics. At some point, we could have only robots in the kill zone.”Ukraine, with a pre-war population of around 41 million, has lost over 150,000 fighters in the war since 2022, according to estimates by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and others. Hundreds of others have been mutilated or permanently disabled. Even those who return without physical injuries suffer lasting psychological trauma. Drozhak dreams that a future robot army would put an end to the ability of autocratic regimes worldwide to brutalize their neighbors. “There will be no need to push people on the battlefield anymore,” says Drozhak, the RoverTech CEO. “Once we achieve that in Ukraine, any country with a decent economy would be able to defend themselves just with technology.”RoverTech’s Tarantula active-protection system, which uses acoustic and visual sensors combined with AI algorithms to detect approaching killer drones, is the first step in that direction, he declares.“The future battlefield will rely on networks of robotic sensors and autonomous systems that can continuously monitor dangerous areas, provide early warning, and reduce the need for soldiers to expose themselves to direct threats,” he says. “Human operators will remain responsible for critical decisions, but increasingly advanced sensing technologies will help move people away from the most dangerous positions on the battlefield.”Why UGVs Are VulnerableMilitaries around the world were looking at UGVs prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But those were quite different, explains Samuel Bendett, a defense analyst at the consultancy CNA. They were larger, more complex, and conceived to operate in smaller numbers. The more compact forms now seen in Ukraine are the result of an evolution that paralleled that of the first-person-view (FPV) attack drones. Both needed to be cheap as they don’t last long and small to be less conspicuous. Now, the West is trying to understand the overall role of UGVs in future warfare. So far, in Bendett’s view, the impact of UGVs on warfare isn’t as profound as that of the FPVs and other aerial drones.“Not every terrain would be applicable to using a UGV,” Bendett explains. “So far, a lot fewer countries are seeking to integrate them into their combat operations than UAVs, which very much democratized the way of enabling short-range to mid-range strikes against adversaries.”UGVs, he points out, are much more susceptible to communication disruptions than UAVs, while being less suitable for autonomous operations and swarming due to the complexity of ground terrain.“With UAVs, communication is much easier,” according to Bendett. “There are no interferences between the ground station and the UAV save the distance, Earth’s curvature and the radio horizon. But on Earth, there’s lots of different obstacles that interfere with radio signals.”Most UGVs rely on Starlink as the first choice for operator control, but even that comes with problems. Starlink signals are easily disrupted by trees and buildings. And Russia, having been cut off from Starlink, is working hard to find ways to jam the system.On top of that, says Lange, as UAV autonomy progresses, UGVs could be left behind. The reason is that UGVs are likely to remain dependent on operator communication links for some time yet, and will therefore be vulnerable to enemy UAVs that can’t be stopped by jamming systems that still provide some protection today.“The low production cost of strike drones will mean that UGVs will have to endure a barrage of strikes,” Lange says, “That might be too much. The question is whether you can make UGVs more survivable on the frontline both in terms of command and control and the actual survivability of that many strikes.”Still, he thinks there’s “no path back from UGVs.” The idea of distributing a whole range of tasks in the past performed by a single large and expensive tank to a fleet of small, cheap UGVs provides more resilience against the omnipresent drones. Moreover, although many international commentators now say that Russia appears to be losing, the war grinds on—and so does the cat-and-mouse game of lethal innovation.]]>
