US company’s AI lets Ukraine’s cheap kamikaze drones track targets on their own

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. “We found that we can train people within—I’m not kidding—60 seconds to operate this drone and even to operate the swarm, because you just move up and down to steer them in the right direction towards the target,” Meier said. “And when you are close enough to acquire the target, you just select it on the screen.” The prospect of deploying fully autonomous drones on the battlefield may seem to be creeping closer. But Meier emphasized that Auterion believes in keeping a human in the target selection process. “I am not sure if our adversaries eventually will allow us that, because they might enter into a way of warfare where we have to send autonomous systems against autonomous systems and let them make split-second decisions,” Meier said. “But until we are at that point, we as a company, and I personally believe, it’s really good if a human operator makes a life-or-death decision.” Having visited Ukraine eight times to talk with the country’s top political and military leaders while working alongside Ukrainian drone manufacturers, Meier praised Ukraine for developing a system that enables a rapid cycle of innovation and improvement informed by battlefield experience. “The Ukrainian forces are relatively accepting of initial battlefield failure,” Meier told Ars. “A lot of the Ukrainian firms didn’t show up with a perfectly working product—they showed up with something that was better than nothing, and then iterated through a lot of failures towards a point where it works every single time.” Ukraine has also created an effective system for evaluating how well new drones and other weapons perform on the battlefield in terms of hit rates and delivering results of military value, Meier said. That feeds back into the cycle of innovation and has enabled Ukrainian companies to take huge risks in developing drones, robots and other weapons, while learning from failures on how to harden their systems for modern battlefields. By comparison, the US military’s strict schedule for selecting new drone technologies through the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program means that companies cannot easily come back several weeks later with a greatly improved product if they fail to make the cut at each selection stage. But Meier described Auterion as being well positioned to bring some lessons learned from Ukrainian battlefields back to compete within the more regimented US system. The US military will also need the equivalent of a common operating system for its command and control systems to work seamlessly with autonomous drones from many different manufacturers as it looks to eventually deploy thousands of drones, Meier said. He described Auterion’s long-term ambition as creating a software ecosystem that allows various software companies to develop applications for many types of drones from different companies—a vision that draws from his own experience in developing open source software and open hardware standards used in the drone industry. “You need the autonomy to fold into your command system, which means you need the same operating system, and maybe you can afford to integrate two or three—like there are apps for iOS and Android and I think that’s OK,” Meier said. “But you can’t have 15.”