How Skynode-S is revolutionizing drone warfare in Ukraine
The war in Ukraine has largely become a war of drones, which are continuously evolving. The massive use of control signal jammers has led to the development of other solutions to bypass this problem. One of them is the high degree of autonomy provided by Skynode-S modules. Here’s what they are and how they work.
Drones in Ukraine are used as a substitute for military precision weapons. It has become the norm to use FPV drones with outdated anti-tank grenades, such as the PG-7VL or cumulative warheads removed from World War II-era hand grenades.
These types of drones, worth at most a few thousand dollars, are perfectly suited for targeting individual soldiers, BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, tanks—even the latest T-90M models—or even downing helicopters.
The problem arose when the Russians began to massively use drone control signal and GPS signal jammers. Since then, there have been periods of drone operator powerlessness or renewed dominance if it was possible to adjust the control frequency beyond the range of the Russian jammers.
To minimize the impact of these jammers, Ukrainians and Western companies supporting them sought other solutions. Currently, the most promising options include drone communication through extended fiber optic cables and the Skynode-S modules developed by the American-Swiss company Auterion.
Skynode-S: A module that can be integrated with any drone
The key solution turned out to be an independent module that can be plugged into any drone thanks to the open architecture developed by Auterion in 2008.
As company director and founder Lorenz Meier admitted in an interview with Breaking Defense, that the work started "In a more peaceful world, where I was personally focused more on disaster recovery and urban navigation. But since then, the world has become a more dangerous place, and the freedoms that we’re taking for granted need to be protected."
The company managed to create an independent module in line with Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) principles, allowing for easy integration with other systems. The system's openness was tested during a recent hackathon in Poland conducted by the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit.
Teams from over a dozen companies and universities were able to create navigation applications that ran on Auterion’s operating system and test them in the field on real drones. Interestingly, the core of this system is Auterion's open-source software and the MavLink communication protocol, written by Meier during his postgraduate studies in Zurich before founding Auterion.
Skynode-S: Just a good camera is needed to turn an FPV drone into a guided weapon
This module ensures the possibility of pairing the Skynode-S module with any drone. The module relies on artificial intelligence algorithms that, when using a high-resolution camera, can distinguish a given object from the background and track it.
As Lorenz Meier admits, today’s computers do well at identifying cute cats, puppies, or objects, but they struggle with three-dimensional objects, especially when they are camouflaged, partially hidden, poorly lit, or moving. However, after six months of intensive work and numerous failures, the company managed to achieve the desired effect suitable for use in Ukraine.
This means that the drone can attack autonomously in the final phase of the flight, so, for example, a bubble of interference of about a hundred feet around Russian vehicles is not a problem. It is important to note that drones with the Skynode-S module are not completely autonomous, as humans mark the target for the attack, preventing any moral dilemmas.
Additionally, the Skynode-S module offers navigation based on triangulation of the drone's position using radio beacons and computer vision algorithms that compare the observed terrain with a satellite map.
The company is also working on targeting radio signal emitters, which will make the drone function similarly to anti-radiation missiles like the AGM-88 HARM. As a result, FPV drones will be capable of directly targeting Russian radars or jammers.
