At a military robot factory at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Wednesday, crews were prepping robots for shipment, shop workers were welding and fitting parts, and no one was working just forty hours a week.
“This is a business, but really what we all are doing here is supporting our fighters on the front lines with robots,” said company co-founder Borys Drozhak in an interview. “Our work depends on feedback from the front; we are talking to soldiers all the time. We build what they are asking for.”
The story of the appearance of a secret production facility pumping out green remote-controlled armored vehicles designed to roll around a modern battlefield and do something to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia started, as many histories of cutting-edge Ukrainian defense manufacturing seem to have begun, in a garage.
In the case of RoverTech, it was west Ukrainian native Bohdan Zmyi and some buddies. Zmyi was a trained mining engineer, but there was no decent work to be had in that field, so when Russia (re)invaded Ukraine in February 2022, he was running a car repair shop.The national government mobilized reserves, and like many Ukrainians, Zmyi and his shop crew did what they could to help friends and relatives now in uniform. By 2023, requests were filtering back from the front lines: the Russians were dropping mines from the sky with artillery, they were digging mines into fields farmers needed to till, they were stringing anti-personnel mines next to villages where people lived. Zmyi’s shop workers were skilled; maybe they could figure out something to help deal with the Russian mines?
The proof-of-concept prototype, put together in spare time from money out of the garage crew’s pockets, was a primitive machine that cut grass using a spinning roller with chains attached to it. It worked but upgrading that into a battle-capable system that detonated mines, would hopefully shrug off an FPV (First Person View) drone hit and could operate in all weather and across all kinds of terrain, was a lot more complicated and expensive. The mine-clearing war robot idea went dormant for a while.
Drozhak, an Odesa native and graduate of an excellent engineering university there, had meanwhile been working in Ireland as a Principal Full Stack Development and Operations Officer, an engineering job title roughly meaning being in charge of a team working on a complex technical task or tasks. Drozhak said it was both software and hardware.
After more than a year working as a consultant/advisor for several high-tech military projects in Ukraine, Drozhak teamed up with Zmyi to form RoverTech to build military robots. Funding was fully private and mostly their own money.
Development of a marketable product – it turned out to be a logistics robot for shifting material to and from the front lines – was straightforward but differed from military tech development in the NATO space. There were no committees or legislative hearings. Instead, after phone calls and text messages with frontline soldiers (particularly sappers, combatants, commanders, staff officers, and logistics unit leaders), company engineers took company cash and built a prototype.
Sometimes the test robot, even one weighing hundreds of kilos, was dispatched to a village near the front by Ukraine’s ubiquitous courier service, Nova Poshta, and picked up there by soldiers for field testing.
Sometimes, one or more of company leadership (Drozhak is Chief Operating Officer, Zmyi is Chief Executive Officer) loaded up the test robot in a van or trailer, hauled it from the production facility to a fighting unit, and the robot was tested in war by its creators. Success was a safe return. A robot stalled out in the gray zone, or blown up by a mine or an FPV, wasn’t failure; it was data. Developers were aware they were in some ways re-creating a mine-clearing system called Crab developed by Great Britain in World War II, but the design is all-local, Drozhak said.
Drozhak said an effective way of fine-tuning a robot’s resistance to blast is to take a Russian shell, explosive cannon round, mortar munition, anti-vehicle or anti-personnel mine, and detonate it next to a prototype. Ukrainian army sappers are an excellent source of Russian military munitions and are glad to donate them for testing, he said.
The final – or latest generation – of that process of trial, error, and explosive testing is called the “Zmiy” v1.2 (Ukrainian “Змій” = snake). Per RoverTech, the robot is a “reusable mobile deminer designed to withstand anti-tank mine explosions…(that) goes where traditional de-miners are powerless (and) fearlessly navigates the most dangerous zones, neutralizing mine threats and ensuring a safe passage for our military forces and civilians.” Drozhak said it is the first mine-clearing robot fielded in the Russo-Ukraine War.
Sitting in the factory parking lot, the robot is a kitchen-table-sized, box-like vehicle somewhat resembling an oversized ATV with a rotating roller/chain assembly bolted on the front. Departing from conventional NATO-standard design, preferring tank-style caterpillar tracks or all-terrain 4WD tires for robots and manned combat vehicles, Zmiy wheels are old school, all-metal, with projecting traction plates, almost identical to tractor wheels manufactured by John Deere and International Harvester in the early 1900s.
“One of the things we learned in our testing is that our Ukrainian Black Earth, when it rains, becomes this thick mud that can completely gum up a caterpillar-tracked transport system,” Drozhak said. “Metal wheels roll over the top of Ukrainian mud better than tank tracks.”
For a Ukrainian frontline soldier in a sector infested with mines, or a civilian supporting him, the key Zmiy v1.2 specs are it weighs close to a ton, its two operators can get it clearing mines in about two minutes, that once the chains are spinning they will clear a safe path about as wide as a man is tall, and the robot will keep doing that for an hour, but after that the air filters will need changing. The price of that capacity is around $25,000.
Zmyi said, so far, the best-selling robot has been a basic, logistics unit Ukrainian combat units use to deliver supplies to frontline troops and evacuate wounded. RoverTech in 2025 is on track to build and delivered to front line units more than 700 robots of all types and production capacity will grow, he said. Kyiv Post during its visit to RoverTech premises saw ground being prepared for expanded work space.
Drozhak said that based on customer feedback and company calculations, every time an AFU military robot heads out on a mission, it probably supplants five human Ukrainian soldiers who, absent the robot, would have had to expose themselves to Russian drones and artillery. AFU Units operating robots en masse fight a more powerful Russian opponent and are able – thanks in part to robots’ taking risks, not humans – inflict 20 Russian casualties to one Ukrainian casualty suffered, Drozhak said.
Russian army use of ground robots is practically unheard of, and medical evacuation of wounded is not a priority. The most common means by which a Russian soldier wounded in battle reaches treatment and evacuation is if he is able to make his way to a casualty treatment point under his own power. In the AFU, casualty evacuation is an across-the-force priority, and combat medics in most units are considered elite soldiers with critical combat skills.
Kyiv Post research using internal reports from an AFU combat brigade performing all its tactical logistics with ground robots generally confirmed Drozhak’s exchange rate figures. According to a logistics officer in that brigade, in a week, robots move 40 tons of supplies to and from front lines, and vehicle deliveries – and strikes on them by Russian forces – are effectively nil. Kyiv Post did not make public the brigade’s identity in this article, for security reasons.
Drozhak said orders for robots come from a variety of customers, the largest being the AFU itself, whose supply officers compile individual unit requests into batch orders. But besides the AFU, he said, RoverTech sells to individual units or troop commands needing ground robots, Ukrainian civil society groups typically collecting donations to help out a locally raised combat unit, and international groups doing much the same thing, but soliciting donations abroad from non-Ukrainians wanting to help the Ukrainian defense effort.
“Those who can afford to purchase a full robot will contact RoverTech directly. But many people want to help Ukraine and don’t have $25,000 for a full robot,” said Valentyna Malko, director and founder of the grassroots military support group Life Robots UA. “Through our fundraising, they can contribute to the acquisition of these life-saving robots.”
Drozhak said that, notwithstanding an October national government declaration that Ukraine’s military equipment sales abroad would be allowed by the end of 2025, in the robot business, that permission has not yet been granted, and so all financing still comes from domestic sales. Zmyi said RoverTech’s commercial prospects look solid because future demand for the military looks to be strong.
Major production capacity expansion and seriously reduced prices are possible, but only if and when selling a RoverTech robot on the international market were to become legal, both said.
The company leaders said they are confident they can sell as many robots as they can build in an overseas market, because a competing NATO-standard mine-clearing robot costs eight to ten times more than the Zmiy 1.2, which was developed in actual war using combat experience.