By Max Hunder, Reuters
Servicemen from an artillery unit of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, training to use a drone during in December 2023. Photo: Dmytro Smolienko / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP
As the future of warfare pivots towards artificial intelligence, Ukraine is sitting on a valuable resource: millions of hours of footage from drones which can be used to train AI models to make decisions on the battlefield.
AI has been deployed by both sides on the battlefield during Russia's invasion of Ukraine to identify targets, scanning images far quicker than a human can.
Founder of OCHI, a non-profit Ukrainian digital system which centralises and analyses video feeds from over 15,000 drone crews working on the frontlines, Oleksandr Dmitriev told Reuters his system had collected two million hours, or 228 years, of battlefield video from drones since 2022.
That would provide vital data for AI to learn from.
"This is food for the AI: If you want to teach an AI, you give it two million hours (of video), it will become something supernatural."
According to Dmitriev, the footage could be used to train AI models in combat tactics, spotting targets and assessing the effectiveness of weapons systems.
"It is essentially experience which can be turned into mathematics," he said, adding that an AI program could study the trajectories and angles at which weapons were most effective.
The system was originally made in 2022 to give military commanders an overview of their areas of the battlefield by showing them drone footage from all nearby crews side by side on one screen.
After the system was rolled out, the team running it realised that video being sent back by drones could prove useful as a record of the war so they began to store it.
On average, Dmitriev said five or six terabytes of new data were added every day from the fighting.
Image Quality
Dmitriev said he was talking with representatives from some of Ukraine's foreign allies that had expressed interest in his OCHI system, but declined to provide details.
Senior fellow at the US based Centre for a New American Security Samuel Bendett said such a vast pool of data would be extremely valuable in teaching AI systems to identify what exactly they were seeing, and what steps they should take.
"Humans can do this intuitively, but machines cannot, and they have to be trained on what is or isn't a road, or a natural obstacle, or an ambush," he said.
A fellow at Wadhwani AI centre at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies Kateryna Bondar said the size of the data set and the image quality were important, as AI models learned to recognise targets based on shapes and colours.
Ukraine also had another system, called Avengers, developed by it's defence ministry, which centralises and collects video from drones and CCTV.
The ministry declined to provide information about this system. However, it had previously said that Avengers spots 12,000 Russian pieces of equipment a week using AI identification tools.
Thousands of drones are already using AI systems to fly themselves into targets without human piloting, and Ukraine is using AI technologies to help demine its territory.
Ukrainian companies were developing drone swarms, where a computer system would be able to execute commands for an interlinked cloud of dozens of drones.
Russia had also touted it's use of battlefield AI, most notably for target recognition in Lancet strike drones, which had proved lethal against Ukrainian armoured vehicles.
- Reuters