When The Russians Jam, Ukraine's Best Strike Drones Navigate By Themselves
Terrain-matching
What does a drone strike force do when communication is hard … or even sometimes impossible?
One answer: plan to occasionally lose the connection between man and machine. That’s what Ukraine’s special operations forces are doing. Ukrainian SOF’s best medium-range strike drones have backup navigation systems that take over when a direct connection to a distant human operator gets disrupted by weather, terrain or enemy electronic warfare.
Borrowing technology pioneered by American industry decades ago, Ukrainian drone firms are installing basic terrain-matching systems in larger one-way attack drones. In terrain-matching, a downward-looking camera scans the landscape passing beneath a drone or missile and matches it to an internal database. That way, the munition knows where it is even when it loses connection to overhead satellite constellations or distant human operators.
