Russia Just Gave Its Cheapo Plywood Attack Drones A.I. Targeting

The Gerbera is Russia's autonomous middle-strike drone

A Gerbera in mid-air. Ukrainian defense ministry capture

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Russia’s cheap Gerbera drones are getting a little more expensive—and a lot more capable. And that’s bad news for Ukrainian forces as both sides in Russia’s 53-month wider war on Ukraine escalate their attacks on the enemy’s logistics.

The upgrade is AI-assisted targeting, and it gives the $10,000 Gerbera the same machine vision Russia put on its far pricier Geran strike drones. In the same way Ukrainian drone units are relentlessly bombarding Russian supply lines with their A.I.-assisted “middle strike” drones, Russian drone units can now bombard Ukrainian supply lines, potentially weakening Ukrainian units before Russian units even make contact with them.

In recent days, the first Gerberas have appeared with A.I.-assisted targeting. It’s the same “Seeker” modification the Russians recently added to their long-range Geran attack drones—Russia’s licensed copy of the Iranian Shahed-136: forward-looking cameras feeding a Raspberry Pi microcomputer that runs machine vision software.

On the Gerans, the operator picks out a target—a truck, a locomotive—from around a kilometer away and locks the drone onto it. From there the machine vision flies the rest of the run, holding the lock through the Ukrainian jamming that would otherwise break the operator’s radio link in the final seconds.

Russia has standardized the guidance, communications and navigation components across the Gerbera Seeker and the Geran Seeker, the Hudson Institute reported on July 29, so the 18-kg Gerbera should finish its attacks the same way. The Gerbera Seeker also picks up an inertial navigation unit and a jam-resistant Kometa-M satellite antenna carried over from the Geran-2.

Greater autonomy via the Seeker mod helps the propeller-driven, plywood-and-foam Gerberas strike more widely within their range of up to 600 km—less when they’re carrying a warhead. As it happens, 600 km is just enough to hold at risk all the main supply lines for Ukraine’s front-line brigades and regiments. Russian crews have already been hunting Ukrainian trains with cruder versions of the same idea.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.