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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After the Estonian startup KrattWorks dispatched the first batch of its Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopters to Ukraine in mid-2022, the company's officers thought they might have six months or so before they'd need to reconceive the drones in response to new battlefield realities. The 46-centimeter-wide flier was far more robust than the hobbyist-grade UAVs that came to define the early days of the drone war against Russia. But within a scant three months, the Estonian team realized their painstakingly fine-tuned device had already become obsolete.

Rapid advances in jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. Its latest technology is a neural-network-driven optical navigation system, which allows the drone to continue its mission even when all radio and satellite-navigation links are jammed. It began tests in Ukraine in December, part of a trend toward jam-resistant, autonomous UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles). The new fliers herald yet another phase in the unending struggle that pits drones against the jamming and spoofing of electronic warfare, which aims to sever links between drones and their operators. There are now tens of thousands of jammers straddling the front lines of the war, defending against drones that are not just killing soldiers but also destroying armored vehicles, other drones, industrial infrastructure, and even tanks.

"The situation with electronic warfare is moving extremely fast," says Martin Karmin, KrattWorks' cofounder and chief operations officer. "We have to constantly iterate. It's like a cat-and-mouse game."

[...] Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren't jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.

The drone's dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China's BeiDou, and Russia's GLONASS. It's been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they're flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.

At the heart of the quadcopter's matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.

"Even if it gets lost, it can recognize some patterns, like crossroads, and update its position," Karmin says. "It can make its own decisions, somewhat, either to return home or to fly through the jamming bubble until it can reestablish the GNSS link again."

Just as machine guns and tanks defined the First World War, drones have become emblematic of Ukraine's struggle against Russia. It was the besieged Ukraine that first turned the concept of a military drone on its head. Instead of Predators and Reapers worth tens of millions of dollars each, Ukraine began purchasing huge numbers of off-the-shelf fliers worth a few hundred dollars apiece—the kind used by filmmakers and enthusiasts—and turned them into highly lethal weapons. A recent New York Times investigation found that drones account for 70 percent of deaths and injuries in the ongoing conflict.

[...] Tech minds on both sides of the conflict have therefore been working hard to circumvent electronic defenses. Russia took an unexpected step starting in early 2024, deploying hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber. Like a twisted variation on a child's kite, the lethal UAVs can venture 20 or more kilometers away from the controller, the hair-thin fiber floating behind them, providing an unjammable connection.

"Right now, there is no protection against fiber-optic drones," Vadym Burukin, cofounder of the Ukrainian drone startup Huless, tells IEEE Spectrum. "The Russians scaled this solution pretty fast, and now they are saturating the battle front with these drones. It's a huge problem for Ukraine."

Ukraine, too, has experimented with optical fiber, but the technology didn't take off, as it were. "The optical fiber costs upwards from $500, which is, in many cases, more than the drone itself," Burukin says. "If you use it in a drone that carries explosives, you lose some of that capacity because you have the weight of the cable." The extra weight also means less capacity for better-quality cameras, sensors, and computers in reconnaissance drones.

Instead, Ukraine sees the future in autonomous navigation. This past July, kamikaze drones equipped with an autonomous navigation system from U.S. supplier Auterion destroyed a column of Russian tanks fitted with jamming devices.

"It was really hard to strike these tanks because they were jamming everything," says Burukin. "The drones with the autopilot were the only equipment that could stop them."

[...] "In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task," Burukin says. "That's where the development is heading."

The cat-and-mouse game is nowhere near over. Companies including KrattWorks are already thinking about the next innovation that would make drone warfare cheaper and more lethal. By creating a drone mesh network, for example, they could send a sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drone followed by a swarm of simpler kamikaze drones to find and attack a target using visual navigation.

"You can send, like, 10 drones, but because they can fly themselves, you don't need a superskilled operator controlling every single one of these," notes KrattWorks' Karmin, who keeps tabs on tech developments in Ukraine with a mixture of professional interest, personal empathy, and foreboding. Rarely does a day go by that he does not think about the expanding Russian military presence near Estonia's eastern borders.

"We don't have a lot of people in Estonia," he says. "We will never have enough skilled drone pilots. We must find another way."

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