Ukraine's Sky Sentinel: Autonomous AI turret repels drone threats
Ukrainian engineers have developed the Sky Sentinel system, an autonomous air defense turret. Here’s what it is and how it works.
Russia has been using Iranian Shahed drones extensively to attack Ukrainian cities. It is estimated that since February 24, 2022, Russia has launched over 45,000 drones targeting energy facilities, civilian infrastructure, and residential areas. While these drones are easy to hit, they pose a significant problem for Ukrainians when coordinated with cruise and ballistic missiles.
This overloads the air defense systems, allowing some attacking objects to get through. Ukrainians lack sufficient personnel and air defense systems like the Gepard. One solution to these shortcomings, as described by the United24 portal, is the autonomous Sky Sentinel anti-aircraft turrets.
Anti-drone defense based on AI — support for traditional methods
Current methods of eliminating Shahed drones include standard air defense systems such as NASAMS and Gepard, electronic warfare systems, mobile intervention teams on pickup trucks equipped with machine guns and handheld air defense systems, and fighter jet patrols.
Unfortunately, this is not always sufficient, which is where autonomous turrets based on artificial intelligence come into play. The creators estimate that defending a city would require 10–30 turrets integrated with target detection radar.
Autonomous defensive turret
The Sky Sentinel is an autonomous turret operating independently with artificial intelligence algorithms, equipped with a Browning M2 or similar large-caliber machine gun. It can rotate 360 degrees and can distinguish Shahed drones from large birds, for instance, and is even capable of targeting a cruise missile. The system's limit is for objects moving up to 500 mph.
According to its creators, the turret will be capable of autonomously detecting an object, tracking it, calculating the trajectory based on flight path analysis, determining the aiming point, and firing shots.
Each stage presented a significant challenge for the engineers, but the prototype has already taken down four Shahed drones and can combat drones five times smaller. The biggest challenge was aligning the components and ensuring the precision of the turret's movement mechanism, as even a fraction of a millimeter of play can affect shooting accuracy by several yards over a distance of several hundred yards.
The main engineer describes the process of creating Sky Sentinel as follows: "We solve dozens of microproblems to make everything work as one smoothly operating system. The goal is no mechanical play, no software delays, impeccable optics, and precision of fire. Everything must work in perfect synchronization."
It's important to note that the project relies on foreign components currently without analogs in Ukraine, such as optoelectronic components and those responsible for measuring the distance to the target.
The main engineer of the project admits that maintaining quality control and managing defects will be a challenge once serial production begins. Currently, this is not difficult, as these issues only concern a few prototypes right now.
However, if needed, it's possible to mass-produce several dozen turrets per month, with a unit cost of about $150,000. This is very low compared to other reusable anti-drone measures since rockets for even the cheaper air defense systems cost the same amount.
