The growing focus on robots on the battlefield coincides with flying drones making the modern battlefield exceptionally deadly for human soldiers. There is continuous drone control and drone strikes created a “kill zone”. By February 2026, it can operate without the risk of drone strikes, extending 12 miles (20 kilometers) beyond front-line positions, forcing individual soldiers to hunt or rely on the darkness of night, anti-thermal cloaks or foggy conditions. Such drones are still causing damage most of the casualties on the battlefield on both sides as the full-scale war entered its fifth year. The Latest military drones In combat testing by Ukraine, it combines autonomous, on-board software and AI-powered capabilities to track and engage targets even if they lose contact with their human operators due to enemy jamming.
Robots report for duty
By comparison, the use of ground robots in the Russia-Ukraine war has been relatively modest, with Ukraine reporting thousands of ground robot missions per month versus hundreds of thousands of unmanned flights per month. Still, recent figures show that Ukraine’s military has stepped up efforts to deploy more robots for supply and medical evacuation, which could reduce human exposure to drone threats. Ukraine is also increasingly deploying such robots in combat roles, armed with machine guns and grenade launchers, or sometimes equipped to detonate as spinner bombs.
Examples of such robots are robots Droid TW 12.7 Developed by Ukrainian company DevDroid. The company’s marketing material describes the tracked robot as armed with an M2 Browning machine gun mounted on a remote-controlled turret and capable of traveling 15 miles (25 kilometers) at a speed equal to the walking speed of an adult. A human operator can communicate with the robot via radio, and the robot can also connect to Starlink’s satellite service.
