- Vyriy 15 FPV with Fourth Law TFL-1 AI guidance allegedly hit Russian logistics 68 miles (110 KM) away
- Ukraine’s ever-innovative drone industry continues to achieve economies of scale even as it becomes a growing threat to Russian advances.
- With a payload capacity of 8 kg and the possibility of being equipped with a thermal imaging module and electronic warfare deterrence, it offers an interesting alternative to comparable fixed-wing drones that cost thousands of dollars.
Basic FPV drones are nothing new in a market flooded with hundreds, if not thousands, of options that can cost as little as $100 to $200, but the conflict between Russia and Ukraine may have raised the stakes for the affordability of a different type of UAV that leverages the same technology: attack drones.
The Vyriy 15 is a self-described “kamikaze drone” from the company that offers a claimed strike range of 40 to 70 km with a payload of up to 8 kg that can be equipped with a thermal imaging module and an extended-band VTX module to make jamming more difficult.
With a control range of up to 30 km and a flight duration of 20 minutes (with payload) and a cruising speed of 60-100 km/h, it is not the most technologically advanced drone out there, but at its supposed price of $500, it doesn’t need to be.
A record-breaking AI-backed FPV attack
On July 10, Yaroslav Azhnyuk, CEO of Ukrainian autonomy developer The Fourth Law, announced on
This is both a significant achievement for Ukraine’s domestic drone industry and a key indicator of how quickly the war between Russia and Ukraine has become a war of attrition, with supply lines increasingly attacked to prevent significant progress in either direction.
It also shows how AI on the battlefield is shaping the conflict: the Vyriy 15 is, by default, a manually controlled drone that would otherwise need an operator or relay to get closer to the theater of war.
The competition is the American-made Hornets, fixed-wing drones that can cost more than $5,000, a 10-fold increase in cost for an already cash-strapped Ukrainian military that is increasingly seeking localized solutions.
The optional AI module used to set the record is The Fourth Law’s TFL-1, a machine vision terminal guidance module that operates on the fire-and-forget principle: once the operator visually designates a target, an onboard computer takes over the final approach, essentially countering Russian jammers that would otherwise disrupt a video link.
If Ukraine manages to make this type of warfare widespread in the future while reducing costs to a tenth of what it does now, reliably attacking as deep as 100 kilometers into enemy territory while also proving difficult to block or costly to intercept, drones like the Vyriy 15 could signal an evolution on the modern battlefield, even as aggression with low-cost drone swarms is already being rewarded in other conflicts such as the US-Iran war.
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