Ukrainian drone operators have destroyed Russian armored vehicles and even helicopters using $400 Shrike FPV drones. Now thousands of those drones are being upgraded with AI that lets them track and home in on moving targets on their own.
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. Under a $100 million contract — reportedly funded by Germany — the companies plan to deliver 50,000 drones fitted with Auterion's Skynode S strike kits in the coming months.
Operators can fly the drones into a battle area, designate a target up to half a mile away, and "flip the switch" to put them into fire-and-forget terminal guidance mode. The drone keeps tracking and striking even if it loses its radio link — and it relies solely on its onboard camera, giving it immunity to GPS jamming.
The autonomy runs on a Western-made Arm chip costing just $18, and each upgraded Shrike costs about $2,000 versus $400 for manually piloted versions — still a fraction of Western "precision munitions" priced in the six or seven figures per shot, as Auterion CEO Lorenz Meier put it. Future software updates could enable a single operator to command swarms of autonomous drones; the company has demonstrated the capability at a US military range in Florida.
Meier emphasized that Auterion believes in keeping a human in the target-selection loop: "It's really good if a human operator makes a life-or-death decision."
