Ukraine's Sky Sentinel: AI‑driven defence against drone threat
Ukrainian engineers have developed the Sky Sentinel system, an autonomous air defence turret. Here's what it is and how it works.
The Russians are 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. Although these drones are easy targets, they pose a significant problem for Ukrainians when coordinated with cruise and ballistic missiles.
This usage overwhelms air defence systems, and some attacking objects always get through. Ukrainians simply lack the personnel and air defence systems like the Gepard. One solution to mitigate these shortcomings, as described by the United24 portal, is the autonomous Sky Sentinel anti-aircraft turrets.
Anti-drone defence based on AI — support for traditional methods
Current methods of eliminating Shahed drones include standard air defence systems such as NASAMS or Gepard, electronic warfare systems, mobile intervention teams on pickup trucks equipped with machine guns and handheld air defence systems, and fighter jet patrols.
Unfortunately, this is not always enough, and that's where the next barrier, in the form of autonomous turrets based on artificial intelligence, is meant to appear. The creators estimate that defending a city would require 10 to 30 turrets integrated with target detection radar.
Autonomous defensive turret
Sky Sentinel is an autonomous turret that operates independently based on artificial intelligence algorithms and is equipped with a Browning M2 or a similar large-calibre machine gun. It is capable of rotating 360 degrees and can distinguish Shahed drones from large birds, for instance, and the system is even capable of targeting a cruise missile. The limit is for objects moving up to 800 kilometres per hour.
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 was a huge challenge for the constructors, but the prototype has already taken down four Shahed drones and is capable of combating 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 millimetre of play can affect shooting precision by several metres over a distance of several hundred metres.
This is how the main engineer describes the process of creating Sky Sentinel: "We solve dozens of micro problems to make everything work as a smoothly operating system. The goal is no mechanical play, software delays, impeccable optics, and precision in fire. Everything must work in perfect synchronization."
It is worth noting that the project relies on foreign components that currently have no analogues in Ukraine. These are 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 at the moment.
However, if needed, it will be possible to mass-produce several dozen turrets per month, with a unit cost of about 150,000 dollars. This is very low compared to other reusable anti-drone measures, as rockets for even the cheaper air defence systems cost a similar amount.
