LVIV, Ukraine — Ukraine needs a “new Manhattan Project,” former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told a standing-room-only crowd of self-proclaimed tech nerds on Saturday at IT Arena here, the country’s biggest annual technology conference.
Then he played an AI-generated clip of what he meant: a robopunk mix of humanoid and crab-like ground robots skittering across a barren front line, doing work that is still too complicated for the robots Ukraine fields today.
The video laid out Fedorov’s vision for an Army of Robots, a force of two-legged upright and other ground robots that would take over many of the front line’s most dangerous but necessary jobs from soldiers.
“Our idea is to combine engineers, startups and capital into one ecosystem so we can launch humanoid-like robots on the battlefield,” Fedorov told Defense News in an exclusive interview after his presentation.
“We want to eventually substitute our infantry with these robots.”
To get there, Fedorov is calling on specialists in robotics, AI, sensors and autonomous systems to pool their talent in the kind of concentrated wartime push that built the first atomic bomb, and to focus it on the machines he says will one day replace Ukraine’s infantry.
The 35-year-old aims for the group to have its first confirmed battlefield result from a humanoid-like robot within six months and, within a year, an assault in which robots take on the most dangerous parts of a mission with no infantry alongside them.
To hit the six-month mark, there isn’t time to spend on research and development, he said, so he will begin by investing in companies with weapons that have already been tested and shown some market viability.
Fedorov wants Ukraine to seize the initiative in the war’s next technological cycle before Russia – whose far larger army and industrial base let it scale new weapons quickly – gets there first.
“Russia always thinks about new strategies, how to hack our frontlines,” he said. “We need to be the first side to hack our frontlines.”
Robots are only one of the defense tech areas that the former minister plans to develop within the new project.
“It could be robots, it could be autonomous systems,” he said. “We will have three key directions: sensors and robots, cheaper anti-jet-Shahed missiles, and AI strike drones and missiles.”
Under Fedorov’s plan, members of the Army of Robots will identify a battlefield problem, find a technical solution and a team, provide resources for development, test the product with troops in real conditions and scale what works.
It is the same model he used for the Army of Drones, which he started in 2022 as Ukraine’s digital transformation minister and which opened the market to Ukrainian drone makers, launched government procurement and operator training and helped form the first strike drone units.
“The Army of Drones … changed everything in our country and in the world and, I think, in the future of the world,” he said. “Now we are trying to build the same ecosystem for robots.”
Ukrainian troops already lean heavily on ground robots for assaults and basic tasks, carrying out more than 25,000 logistics and evacuation missions in August – 3.3 times more than in January, according to the Defense Ministry.
But most of the futuristic robot designs featured in Fedorov’s video, humanoids included, are not yet used in combat in Ukraine today, and the ground robots that are in use almost always have a human operator at the controls, usually over Starlink.
Fedorov said the ambitious effort will involve multiple companies working on different stages of the product lifecycle, with some making components, some assembling complete robots and others developing software to run them.
“We have some funds for these first companies,” Fedorov said, declining to name names. “It means that we have two or three companies that will be our partners in these directions.”
The Army of Robots will include a venture fund to invest in technology teams, its own defense-tech companies and a research and development arm, according to a press statement issued after the announcement.
The initiative comes weeks after Fedorov announced that he was starting a new defense company, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as its first investor.
Fedorov told Defense News the company will start with a corporate fund and may later launch its own venture fund.
The biggest challenge facing the development and deployment of these next-gen robots is the necessary speed of innovation, Fedorov said.
Ukraine has to field these robots fast enough to save its infantry and stay ahead of Russia, which he said has learned to copy Ukraine’s battlefield innovations and scale them rapidly.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is heading into another winter of Russian strikes with air-defense interceptors in short supply.
The weekend Fedorov made his announcement, Russian drones hit kindergartens and university buildings in Kyiv, struck a large civilian hospital and destroyed a food market and multiple gas stations outside the city, killing at least three people and injuring dozens in a combined aerial attack that lasted days.
“We don’t have enough time,” he said. “We need to achieve these results as soon as possible.”
Unmanned
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