Ukraine's drone war: Breaking Russian jammers with Skynode-S tech

The war in Ukraine has largely become a war of drones, which are continuously evolving. The massive use of control signal jammers has led to the development of other solutions to bypass this problem. One of these solutions is the high degree of autonomy provided by Skynode-S modules. Here’s what they are and how they work.

Drones in Ukraine are used as substitutes for military precision weapons. It has become the norm to use FPV drones with outdated anti-tank grenades such as the PG-7VL or cumulative warheads removed from World War II-era hand grenades.

These types of drones, worth at most a few thousand dollars, are perfectly suited for hunting, for instance, individual soldiers, BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, tanks, even of the latest T-90M type, or for downing helicopters.

The problem arose when the Russians began to massively use drone control signal or GPS signal jammers. Since then, there have been periods of both drone operator powerlessness and renewed dominance if it was possible to adjust the control frequency beyond the range of the Russian jammers.

To minimize the uselessness of FPV drones in such an environment, Ukrainians and Western companies supporting them sought other solutions. Currently, the most promising are two options: drone communication through extended fibre optic cables, and Skynode-S modules developed by the American-Swiss company Auterion.

The key turned out to be an independent module that can be plugged into any drone thanks to the open architecture developed by the American-Swiss company Auterion in 2008.

As company director and founder Lorenz Meier admitted in an interview with Breaking Defense, "Initially, the module was designed in more peaceful times and was intended, for example, for disaster area searches or urban navigation. However, since then the world has become a more dangerous place, and the freedoms we take for granted must be protected."

The company created an independent module designed according to Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) principles, allowing for easy integration with other systems. The system's openness was tested during a recent hackathon in Poland conducted by the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit.

Teams from over a dozen different companies and universities were able to create navigation applications that ran on Auterion’s operating system and test them in the field on real drones. Interestingly, the core of this system is Auterion's open-source software and the MavLink communication protocol, written by Meier during his postgraduate studies in Zurich before founding Auterion.

This module ensures the possibility of pairing the Skynode-S module with any drone. The module relies on artificial intelligence algorithms that, when using a high-resolution camera, can distinguish a given object from the background and track it.

As Lorenz Meier admits, today’s computers do well at identifying cute cats, puppies, or objects, but they struggle with three-dimensional objects, especially when they are camouflaged, partially hidden behind cover, poorly lit, or moving. However, after six months of very intensive work and many failures, the company managed to achieve the desired effect suitable for use in Ukraine.

This means that the drone attacks autonomously in the last phase of the flight, so, for example, a bubble of interference of about 30 metres around Russian vehicles is not a problem. However, it is worth noting that drones with the Skynode-S module are not completely autonomous, as it is a human who marks the target for the attack, so there are no moral dilemmas here.

Additionally, the Skynode-S module also provides navigation based on the triangulation of the drone's position using radio beacons and computer vision algorithms based on the observed terrain, which is then compared with a satellite map.

The company is also working on targeting radio signal emitters, which in practice will make the drone operate identically to anti-radiation missiles like the AGM-88 HARM. As a result, FPV drones will be capable of directly targeting Russian radars or jammers.