Stew Magnuson
WIESBADEN, Germany — Artem Moroz — a representative of Ukraine’s Brave1 tech incubator — scrolled through a screen of ground robots at the organization’s booth at a recent trade show.
The screen had 20 different models capable of performing a variety of tasks, and the government agency’s head of investor relations had four more screens worth, for a total of 100 Ukrainian-made unmanned ground vehicles — all currently available for operations.
“Most of these companies received [Brave1] grants when they were smaller. We helped them early on, and now they are managing to scale up and get government contracts,” Moroz said.
The use of first-person drones in Ukraine is well known and has already goaded ground forces throughout the world to rethink their tactics, techniques and procedures. The country’s unmanned surface vessels have damaged or scuttled Russian ships on the Black Sea.
However, the employment of ground robots in the Ukraine-Russia war is not as well known. That is about to change.
As the war continues in its fourth year, ground robots are set to proliferate in Ukraine, performing just about all the tasks human soldiers carry out, said Moroz and other sources at the Association of the United States Army’s LandEuro conference held in July in Wiesbaden, Germany.
“Last year was the first year that we experimented with the tactics. What are they capable of doing? But this year, we are scaling up. The government is about to procure at least 15,000 systems,” Moroz said.
There were no Ukrainian companies involved in the ground robot business at the outset of the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion. There are now more than 100, according to Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation statistics. Moroz put that number closer to 150.
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