By the end of 2025, the American-German startup Auterion will deliver 33,000 strike kits for drones with artificial intelligence to Ukraine under a contract with the Pentagon. These drones can be swarmed thanks to Nemyx technology. It runs on the Auterion operating system and comes as an app that allows any compatible drone to join the swarm with a simple software update, reports the Financial Times.
Auterion CEO Lorenz Mayer emphasized that the emergence of drone swarms was a “very important moment”. Although the new software has not yet been used on the battlefield, this year the company plans to send dozens of UAVs capable of operating in swarms using Nemyx to Ukraine. This will enable one soldier to control several drones at the same time.
“The military knows it will saturate their defenses. Everyone is talking about swarming, everyone is afraid of swarming,” Mayer explained.
Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukrainian developers have also experimented with swarms of drones. In particular, the Kyiv company Swarmer claims that its technology has already been used in 82,000 combat operations. CEO and founder of the company Serhiy Kuprienko compares a swarm of UAVs to a living organism in which drones interact with each other, autonomously make decisions about flight and task performance.
Michael Holm, a representative of the German company Systematic, noted that drone manufacturers are now switching to open software systems, which greatly simplifies coordination. According to him, integrating and configuring a swarm now takes days or weeks, not years or months.
At the same time, experts warn that the main problem for such technology remains radio-electronic warfare, because drones in swarms need constant communication. Critics of systems based on artificial intelligence believe that the development of algorithms for controlling swarms may lead to the transfer of most of the combat decisions to AI.
