This company profile is a part of The Air Current’s Special Report on the Ukrainian drone industry, which is available here.
As its name implies, Frontline Robotics creates robotic systems for front line operations, embracing a new model of warfare in which robots increasingly displace humans. “Robots should fight, not humans” is something of a tag line for Ukrainian defense companies, according to co-founder and chief product officer Oleksii Markhovskyi, and it’s one the Frontline team sincerely believes in. “When we see real footage of our robots fight, the way it motivates the team is enormous,” he said. “You are literally saving lives when you put a robot onto the mission.”
Frontline’s product line thus far includes the Burya robotic turret for the Mk 19 40-mm grenade launcher, which can work on either a tripod or a range of unmanned ground vehicles, as well as EW-resistant bomber and reconnaissance drones called Linza and Zoom. It has also developed a control module called Hertz that is highly resistant to electromagnetic interference.
“We did spend quite a while in our lab creating those difficult pieces of technologies such as radio links, because electronic warfare is one of the challenges that we’ve got,” Markhovskyi told TAC in late March. “We are very proud that we haven’t lost a single UAV due to electronic warfare.”
Rather than focusing on a single product, Frontline’s “vision is a little wider,” Markhovskyi explained. “What we promote is the entire robotic operations, where hardware systems are integrated onto each other, so it’s not the human who is passing information from the reconnaissance copter to a ground robot or to a command unit. It’s being done automatically through the mesh of those radio links and the software topology to eliminate human mistakes.”
The company has other products aligned with this vision in development, and is focused on working with end users to deliver solutions that meet their needs.
“What we’ve learned is that creating nice products from the engineering point of view is not enough,” Markhovskyi said. “It needs to be relevant, and by that, you have to work with militaries, with those who actually use your product daily, so it’s not a fancy piece of technology created in the lab. Instead, it’s an iterative work with operators … who can provide both technical feedback and product feedback, and they tell you on a daily basis what does work, what does not work. Only in those conditions can you actually create a meaningful product.”
Write to Elan Head at [email protected]
