Skynode S: Auterion’s autonomy kit lets attack drones fly through jammers

Air warfare, land warfare, networks and digital warfare

KHARKIV REGION, UKRAINE – JUNE 18: A DJI Enterprise drone used as an antenna to amplify the signal of explosive-laden FPV drones that can hit Russian territory from this position is seen in Vovchansk district of Kharkiv region, Ukraine, June 18, 2024. (Photo by Pablo Miranzo/Anadolu via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The war in Ukraine has shown how deadly drones are. It has also proven how vulnerable they are when their radio connection to their human operators is lost, even for a short time. Electronic warfare in Ukraine is causing thousands of drones to be lost every week.

But now Auterion, a Swiss-American company that works for the US, UK, Netherlands and Ukraine and has production lines in Texas and Kyiv, claims to have solved a large part of that problem. The company’s Skynode S upgrade kit, announced on Thursday but already being field tested in Ukraine, is designed to make small drones smart enough to perform some key functions on their own.

A Ukrainian colonel tests Auterion’s Dragon Reference Design drone (Photo by Auterion)

“We do not choose our targets autonomously, because that brings with it a whole new set of ethical considerations,” said Lorenz Meier, founder and CEO of Auterion, in an interview with Breaking Defense. “You determine the target, (that) is a human decision, but from then on everything is fully automated. … The entire terminal guidance is fully automated and cannot be disrupted, does not rely on GPS and also works with moving targets.”

Autonomous targeting is a complex technical problem that the Russians have already attempted with their own Lancet drone – and so far have apparently failed. Militarily, it is of great importance to both sides because the most difficult moment for attack drones is often the final approach to their targets.

The fundamental physics problem is that small drones can only carry small amounts of explosives, so even a small mistake can mean a failure. But small drones – at least those without the Skynode S – cannot perform precise maneuvers on their own: they require a human pilot to control them remotely. This means that an untrained, exhausted, or just plain hapless operator can botch the attack at the last minute. Or the enemy can force a failure by jamming the control link, which requires less and less power the closer the drone gets to the target.

To do without that human guidance, you need a drone with electronic eyes sharp enough and a digital brain intelligent enough to distinguish the chosen target from the background clutter and navigate to it autonomously. But while computers have become pretty good at recognizing static images of cute kittens, puppies, and consumer goods, they have a harder time with three-dimensional objects, especially when they’re camouflaged, partially hidden behind cover, poorly lit, or moving.

Meier emphasizes that Skynode S has solved this problem well enough to give Ukrainian drones an advantage in combat without the need for sophisticated sensors or bulky onboard computers.

“It’s been tough, there have been setbacks and it’s been a very intense six months to get to this point,” he told Breaking Defense. “(But) we’ve made sure we have a really, really good computer vision tracker” that can follow the specified target “even if it’s moving, if it’s rotating, if anything changes.”

Open architecture: The path to infinite upgrades

SkyNode S also enables drones to navigate precisely over long distances when the GPS signal is poor, jammed or otherwise unavailable, Meier said. The same board that runs the target-tracking algorithm can also be connected to jam-proof GPS antennas, electromagnetic sensors that triangulate the drone’s position using radio beacons, and computer vision algorithms that match the terrain beneath the drone with high-resolution satellite maps.

However, all this does not mean that the drone can identify and select its targets itself, stressed Meier. This is a much more complex problem, not only technologically, but also legally and morally.

However, the company is working on an electronic warfare upgrade to Skynode S that would rely on radio and radar signals rather than computer vision for target tracking. It should be possible to program such an electronic warfare drone with a library of unique enemy transmissions and then launch it in the general direction of a radar, jammer or communications node with orders to find and destroy it.

Such homing anti-radiation capabilities have been available in high-end missile systems, such as the American AGM-88 HARM, since the 1980s. But incorporating them into much cheaper drones could dramatically increase their proliferation on the battlefield, at least at shorter ranges.

Close-up of Auterion’s Skynode S autonomy card with attached heatsink for cooling (photo by Auterion)

Remarkably, all of these functions run on an electronic board smaller than a human hand, as Meier demonstrated by holding one up during his video call with Breaking Defense. “I have one of these avionics units here, so look… it’s ridiculously small.”

These cards are also adaptable enough to be installed on drones from different manufacturers and run apps from other companies. This design approach is known as Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA), where different companies agreed on common technical standards so that their software applications and hardware components can be connected to each other in a plug-and-play manner.

“We’ve put a lot of MOSA into practice, in real systems, with real things being used,” Meier said. “We’ve built an app store. (It’s) the Android of drones.”

The openness of the system was recently tested at a hackathon in Poland hosted by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. Teams from more than a dozen different companies and universities were able to develop navigation apps running on Auterion’s operating system and then test them on real drones.

In fact, DIU’s Blue sUAS program – a curated list of small unmanned aerial systems approved for military use – uses Auterion’s open-source software and the MavLink communications protocol that Meier developed as a PhD student in Zurich before founding Auterion. This makes it easier for Auterion to collaborate with other companies from many countries.

“We work with American, European and Ukrainian drone companies,” he said. “We operate systems in the Defense Department’s inventory, the Dutch inventory and the British inventory.”

When Meier started working on autonomous drones in 2008, “it was a more peaceful world, where I was personally more focused on disaster relief and urban navigation,” he told Breaking Defense. “But since then, the world has become a more dangerous place, and the freedoms we take for granted need to be protected.”

“There is a moral obligation not to withhold our technology for defense,” he said. “If we believe we are developing the best operating system for drones, it would be wrong to withhold it, even for lethal applications.”