Ukrainian startup says its drones could work on their own by year’s end, thanks to AI

Armed with a fresh round of investment from the West, Ukrainian drone autonomy startup the Fourth Law is showcasing new footage as it aims to become the first to reach the latest holy grail of drone warfare: full autonomy.

"When we're talking about full autonomy, I think we're definitely going to see singular demos by the end of this year," Yaroslav Azhnyuk, the Fourth Law’s founder and CEO told the Kyiv Independent.

Greater drone autonomy could allow Ukraine to operate in areas fraught with Russian electronic warfare and help offset its manpower disadvantage. As a result, it has become one of the most closely watched fronts in military tech since the start of the full-scale invasion.

For the time being, Azhnyuk believes that Ukraine maintains the lead in autonomous drone development.

"I probably don't know everything, but from what we've seen, (the Russians) are at where we were like a year ago," he said.

The new footage from the Fourth Law displays some particularly effective last-mile targeting that Azhnyuk says is the first of five steps en route to drones that can run their own missions without needing a pilot.

Many existing drones use last-mile targeting that somewhat resembles autofocus on a camera. In the current iteration, the Fourth Law’s TFL-1 artificial intelligence modules use neural nets to identify Russian targets, and include a number of capabilities that Azhnyuk claims Russians have not seen before.

"We can actually identify a particular vehicle and track its boundaries and actually fly in the middle of that vehicle, as opposed to just trying to grab a group of pixels and then hope that that group of pixels, as we get closer and closer to the vehicle, will remain somewhere like in the center of it," Azhnyuk said.

The modules currently add roughly $70 to the cost of a first-person view (FPV) drone, and there are, Azhnyuk said, thousands of them already at the front line, including with the 58th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade.

The company declined to disclose the amount of the investment.

"The software itself is more or less agnostic, and it's easily transferable from FPV to a fixed wing and from fixed wing even to a missile — and that's what we intend to do," he said.

Azhnyuk also runs Odd Systems, a drone component producer that he launched along with the Fourth Law near the end of 2023. His first major startup was Petcube, a Y Combinator-backed company that built cameras for dog owners to remotely interact with their pets.

Ukrainian government defense cluster Brave1 recently showed off an AI-powered "mother drone." Brave1 head Natalia Kushnerska touted over 200 AI-based developments on the battlefield as of February.