You're reading: Robotics lab makes drones that Ukraine can use in war

War means weapons. And for robotics lab at the Step IT Academy in Kyiv, this means using plastic (not ink) to create drones from special printers for use by the Ukrainian army.

Dmytro Franchuk, deputy head of the robotics lab and its key drone engineer, says production is based on 3D printers that use up 20 kilograms of plastic daily. Lab’s 30 drones, paid for by volunteers, are actively used at the war front now.

As the situation in the Donbas deteriorates, with hopes for peace resting on a shaky Feb. 12 agreement in Minsk, Belarus, more drones are needed.

Franchuk’s drones are considered the lightest ones. They can capture images from a maximum distance of 2.5 kilometers and stay in the air up to 20 minutes.

Their average cost is $1,200, while the accompanying equipment for the drone makes the total cost $3,000. A large part of the drone’s cost is human capital used for the production, testing and teaching how to use the gadget.

Compared with the regular price of advanced drones reaching up to $30,000, those developed by the robotics lab in Kyiv are much more affordable.

Lab’s head Ivan Dovgal, the former Step IT Academy head, said the government has not ordered mass production of his drones. He blames bureaucracy and lack of cash in the budget.

“It is hard to estimate the exact cost of one drone,” Franchuk says. “You need to build a couple of vehicles and let them crash before you can finally tell whether it is a working product or not.”

It takes one week of theory and practice to teach soldiers how to use a drone. “As I was the only developer of drones in the lab, I also had to go to the war front to teach soldiers how to work with them. It took time I could use for production,” Franchuk says.

Dovgal says that “everything you see in the lab is produced by robots or is a robot itself.” The first prototype of the known Ukrainian hardware product, Petcube, has been designed and developed in the lab. Now the lab heavily uses 3D printers in their production.

The academy started in 2007. Dovgal used his interest in robotics to teach academy students new ways to apply their engineering skills. It cost him around $2,000 monthly out of his own money to pay salaries to several lab employees and produce new gadgets.

The initial idea behind the lab was to build robots for homes. “The very moment I heard about smart home solutions, I wanted to have a co-working space to work on them myself and let our students create technologies for smart heating, signaling, electronics’ controlling and other aspects of smart home,” Dovgal says.

As time went on, the lab started using 3D printers to make the most of the gadgets’ details.

“The first time I saw 3D printers was about two years ago. At that time I guessed that this is going to be a major trend in just a couple of years,” Dovgal says. “This is exactly what we see now.”

The lab stores three 3D printers. One of them belongs to Dovgal. The price of each reaches $1,600. They are heavily used 24/7 for modeling and making details of future drones and other electronic gadgets.

Up to 90 percent of all details in the vehicles made in the lab are produced with the printers.

Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.