“The situation with electronic warfare is moving extremely fast,” says Martin Karmin, KrattWorks’ cofounder and chief operations officer. “We have to constantly iterate. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game.”
After the Estonian startup KrattWorks dispatched the first batch of its Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopters to Ukraine in mid-2022, the company’s officers thought they might have six months or so before they’d need to reconceive the drones in response to new battlefield realities. The 46-centimeter-wide flier was far more robust than the hobbyist-grade UAVs that came to define the early days of the drone war against Russia. But within a scant three months, the Estonian team realized their painstakingly fine-tuned device had already become obsolete.
Rapid advances in jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. Its latest technology is a neural-network-driven optical navigation system, which allows the drone to continue its mission even when all radio and satellite-navigation links are jammed. It began tests in Ukraine in December, part of a trend toward jam-resistant, autonomous UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles). The new fliers herald yet another phase in the unending struggle that pits drones against the jamming and spoofing of electronic warfare, which aims to sever links between drones and their operators. There are now tens of thousands of jammers straddling the front lines of the war, defending against drones that are not just killing soldiers but also destroying armored vehicles, other drones, industrial infrastructure, and even tanks.
Two soldiers in full military dress stand on a hill while one of them releases a drone.Ukrainian troops tested KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon drone in Estonia last year.KrattWorks
“The situation with electronic warfare is moving extremely fast,” says Martin Karmin, KrattWorks’ cofounder and chief operations officer. “We have to constantly iterate. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game.”
I met Karmin at the company’s headquarters in the outskirts of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. Just a couple of hundred kilometers to the east is the tiny nation’s border with Russia, its former oppressor. At 38, Karmin is barely old enough to remember what life was like under Russian rule, but he’s heard plenty. He and his colleagues, most of them volunteer members of the Estonian Defense League, have “no illusions” about Russia, he says with a shrug.
His company is as much about arming Estonia as it is about helping Ukraine, he acknowledges. Estonia is not officially at war with Russia, of course, but regions around the border between the two countries have for years been subjected to persistent jamming of satellite-based navigation systems, such as the European Union’s Galileo satellites, forcing occasional flight cancellations at Tartu airport. In November, satellite imagery revealed that Russia is expanding its military bases along the Baltic states’ borders.
“We are a small country,” Karmin says. “Innovation is our only chance.”
In KrattWorks’ spacious, white-walled workshop, a handful of engineers are testing software. On the large ocher desk that dominates the room, a selection of KrattWorks’ devices is on display, including a couple of fixed-wing, smoke-colored UAVs designed to serve as aerial decoys, and the Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopter, the company’s flagship product.
Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.
A black quadcopter drone hovers in front of a coniferous tree.The Ghost Dragon reconnaissance drone from KrattWorks can navigate autonomously, by detecting landmarks as it flies over them. KrattWorks
The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.
At the heart of the quadcopter’s matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.
“Even if it gets lost, it can recognize some patterns, like crossroads, and update its position,” Karmin says. “It can make its own decisions, somewhat, either to return home or to fly through the jamming bubble until it can reestablish the GNSS link again.”
Rapid advances in jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. Its latest technology is a neural-network-driven optical navigation system, which allows the drone to continue its mission even when all radio and satellite-navigation links are jammed. It began tests in Ukraine in December, part of a trend toward jam-resistant, autonomous UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles). The new fliers herald yet another phase in the unending struggle that pits drones against the jamming and spoofing of electronic warfare, which aims to sever links between drones and their operators. There are now tens of thousands of jammers straddling the front lines of the war, defending against drones that are not just killing soldiers but also destroying armored vehicles, other drones, industrial infrastructure, and even tanks.
Two soldiers in full military dress stand on a hill while one of them releases a drone.Ukrainian troops tested KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon drone in Estonia last year.KrattWorks
“The situation with electronic warfare is moving extremely fast,” says Martin Karmin, KrattWorks’ cofounder and chief operations officer. “We have to constantly iterate. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game.”
I met Karmin at the company’s headquarters in the outskirts of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. Just a couple of hundred kilometers to the east is the tiny nation’s border with Russia, its former oppressor. At 38, Karmin is barely old enough to remember what life was like under Russian rule, but he’s heard plenty. He and his colleagues, most of them volunteer members of the Estonian Defense League, have “no illusions” about Russia, he says with a shrug.
His company is as much about arming Estonia as it is about helping Ukraine, he acknowledges. Estonia is not officially at war with Russia, of course, but regions around the border between the two countries have for years been subjected to persistent jamming of satellite-based navigation systems, such as the European Union’s Galileo satellites, forcing occasional flight cancellations at Tartu airport. In November, satellite imagery revealed that Russia is expanding its military bases along the Baltic states’ borders.
“We are a small country,” Karmin says. “Innovation is our only chance.”
In KrattWorks’ spacious, white-walled workshop, a handful of engineers are testing software. On the large ocher desk that dominates the room, a selection of KrattWorks’ devices is on display, including a couple of fixed-wing, smoke-colored UAVs designed to serve as aerial decoys, and the Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopter, the company’s flagship product.
Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.
A black quadcopter drone hovers in front of a coniferous tree.The Ghost Dragon reconnaissance drone from KrattWorks can navigate autonomously, by detecting landmarks as it flies over them. KrattWorks
The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.
At the heart of the quadcopter’s matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.
“Even if it gets lost, it can recognize some patterns, like crossroads, and update its position,” Karmin says. “It can make its own decisions, somewhat, either to return home or to fly through the jamming bubble until it can reestablish the GNSS link again.”
No replies