Autonomous drones in the Ukraine war: intercepted video shows Russian FPV drone with target acquisition

Drones are steadily gaining importance for both warring parties in the Ukraine war, and for soldiers on the battlefield they are becoming ever more unpredictable. A newly surfaced video is now said to prove for the first time that Russia has used an autonomous FPV drone – FPV standing for first-person view (FPV). Shortly afterwards, Ukraine announced that it had itself already used autonomous drones, more precisely autonomously operating combat drones.

It was 6 January, 11.35, when a report came in that many had been expecting, even if it pleases no one: on his Telegram channel, Serhiy “Flash”, a Ukrainian soldier and specialist in signals and electronic warfare, reported the use of a Russian drone that operated autonomously. “For the first time I saw with my own eyes an intercepted video of a Russian FPV with machine vision and automatic target acquisition – and all of it in thermal imaging mode.”

Analogue video transmission as a weak point

For context: both sides currently transmit the images from their FPV drones mostly in analogue. This is meant to give the systems greater range and make them more robust against interference and obstacles. When analogue transmission is jammed, this usually shows up as increasing noise. Digitally, bit errors can be repaired to a certain extent, but beyond those limits the transmission breaks off almost instantly.

Analogue transmission does have one drawback, however: it makes the other side's FPV video feeds very easy to intercept. This is probably how Serhiy “Flash” (in the video below, an interview with him from last June) obtained the images of a Russian FPV drone mentioned above. His description: “The pilot flies towards the target and marks it from above, then the drone does everything else by itself.”

What autonomous drones change about FPV operations

In his Telegram post, Serhiy “Flash” sets out the consequences of the new technology for the use of FPV drones in four concrete points:

• Electronic warfare, i.e. interrupting, jamming or overriding the radio signal between pilot and drone, comes to nothing once the target has been marked. From then on, the drone steers itself and no longer needs a working signal link.
• Experienced pilots are no longer needed. The drone itself takes over the most difficult part of the flight, the terminal approach, in which an area of often barely more than one square metre has to be hit.
• If the video feed breaks off close to the ground, the drone is no longer automatically lost. Until now, flights over several kilometres have been supported by repeaters so that the radio signals for video and control still reach their destination over obstacles and the curvature of the earth, even close to the ground.
• Even the more demanding task of hitting a moving target is now handled by the drone.

In conclusion, Serhiy “Flash” says: “This development worries me greatly. It will further increase the role of FPV in the war.”

With the cat now out of the bag, Ukrainian military intelligence also posted videos of its own attacks with autonomously operating drones on its Telegram channel on the evening of 6 January. They show two attacks on Russian air defence systems in Belgorod Oblast, each carried out with one drone. Judging by the infrared images, a Pantsir-S1 and possibly a TOR M2E system were acquired as targets and then attacked autonomously by drones. Which types of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) were used is unclear. Possible candidates include the Phoenix Ghost, which is known to have been delivered to Ukraine but is not in service with the regular forces.