What we know about the Ukrainian army of robot dogs

Ukraine is currently using robot dogs on the battlefield. This is the first known combat use of such machines. The robots were supplied by a British company and are not autonomous. They are controlled remotely and are a walking version of the ubiquitous drones.

“Every unit should have one of these dogs,” says Kurt, commander of the 28th Mechanized Brigade, in an X/Twitter post on the official Defense Ministry account.

Robot in disguise

According to an article in the German tabloid Bild with the misleading headline “Robot dogs sniff out Russian soldiers,” a British company, Robot Alliance, has supplied 30 of the dogs. The Bild article states that the robots conduct research in buildings, trenches and dense forests where drones cannot reach. They are used to locate booby traps and Russian forces, but do not have tracking sensors.

According to Bild, the robots can travel at speeds of up to 15 km/h, have a battery life of up to five hours and can be controlled from a distance of up to three kilometers. The price ranges from 4,000 to 8,000 euros (4,400 to 8,800 US dollars), depending on the model. Videos of Ukrainian operations in the Donetsk region show the robot dog under a camouflage blanket made by the German manufacturer Concamo, which makes it difficult to detect both visually and with thermal imaging cameras. As soon as the robot stops, it disappears with the vegetation in the background.

A press release about the robots of the Ukrainian military fundraiser United24 states that in the event of a capture, the data stored on the robot can be immediately deleted in order to deprive the enemy of the opportunity to obtain information.

Used in Ukraine, made in China

The supplier named by Bild, Brit Alliance, is a security company based in the UK. It offers a wide range of services, from protecting individual VIPs to securing international shipping. It also provides military training and drone security and surveillance. The company did not respond to a request for information, but the company website says it operates in Ukraine.

“We already have extensive experience in this rapidly developing field and use drones in Ukraine and around the world,” the Brit Alliance website says.

Brit Alliance is a security company, not a robot manufacturer, and clearly did not manufacture the machines itself. It didn’t take long for internet analysts to identify the robots in Ukraine as Chinese Unitree Go2 Pros, which could be considered the equivalent of Chinese DJI quadcopters with legs: efficient, highly specialized machines that are readily and cheaply available.

The UniTree Go2 Pro costs $3,500 plus $1,000 shipping from China without extras and is said to reach a top speed of 17.7 km/h, according to the Bild report. Weighing less than 13.6 kg, the Go2 is comfortably portable as the legs can be folded for easy carrying.

The Go2 Pro has an intelligent control system with multiple sets of fisheye cameras looking in all directions, as well as a powerful 1.5Tflop processor and intelligent software that ensure it remains stable even on uneven surfaces or uneven ground. It is capable of some degree of autonomous operation, for example it can visually follow the operator and can also perform more intelligent “side tracking”.

A robot dog looks like a great toy and is often sold as such, but what use does it have for the military?

When the legs hit the rotors

As a scout, the robot dog has two advantages over smaller, faster flying drones.

First, they can get into places they would have trouble getting into. While there are some special drones with shrouded rotors that can operate inside buildings, these are rare and even then, flying them is difficult. The robot dogs can easily explore indoors and search houses and bunkers or march through a trench system ahead of foot soldiers.

Second, as a drone flies over trip wires, pressure plates and other booby traps, the robot dog triggers them. The soldiers know that they can follow the dog safely. If it triggers a mine or booby trap, repairing or replacing it is cheap and easy. It will always be better to put a robot in danger than a human.

Interestingly, however, operators become very attached to their machines: in Iraq, bomb disposal teams working with the far less appealing iRobot tracked robot insisted that their trusty machine be repaired and returned to them rather than replaced with another. One report suggested that operators developed a “dangerous attachment” to their robots, treating them like pets.

The four-legged creature has other useful skills that put it ahead of small drones. One of them is its load-bearing capacity. Unitree says it can carry a payload of up to 9 pounds, and an image from Ukraine shows the machine with an unknown payload. This could be a sensor, an explosive charge, or simply a package of supplies. Ukraine has a variety of small robots on wheels and tracks that have been used to transport all of these things, and a robot with legs can reach places inaccessible to other machines.

The other feature is battery life. The robot can go to a location and lie in wait for a long time. This may simply be to monitor enemy movements, but later robots could play an active role in ambushes.

Robot war dogs

The current generation of four-legged robots has its roots directly in military research and development, particularly the BigDog developed by Boston Dynamics for the US Army, which I wrote about back in 2006. BigDog was intended as a robotic pack mule with impressive stability on difficult terrain, but noise and other factors prevented it from being developed further. Boston Dynamics later developed the smaller, cheaper and more intelligent robot dog Spot, which is now used in industry, and has turned away from the defence sector, saying it does not support military use of its products.

However, the “uncanny valley” effect that causes robot dogs to appear eerie and creepy to the public – the famous Black Mirror episode “Metalhead” was inspired by a Boston Dynamics video – means that Spot is often unfairly insulted.

There are now actually military quadrupeds. Ghost Robots Machines

In one test project, robots are patrolling U.S. Air Force bases, essentially using the robot as a mobile surveillance camera. Others are more daring: In 2021, Ghost Robotics unveiled a version armed with a remote-controlled sniper rifle, and last year the U.S. Marine Corps conducted an exercise with the same robot firing an M72 anti-tank missile launcher.

However, while no one has anything against remote-controlled gun turrets or armed drones, robots with legs provoke a far stronger reaction – sample headline: “Robot dogs with guns look like a dystopian nightmare.” This may be why the US military has not yet deployed such machines – and even the use of unarmed robot dogs by the New York Police Department is highly controversial.

Others may be less concerned about public opinion. In China, the PLA has a Number of videos His troops train with armed four-legged robots, some of which look very similar to the Go2 Pro.

A Russian company also exhibited a “four-legged robot of Russian production M-81” equipped with a rocket launcher at the ARMY-2022 exhibition. It soon turned out that it was a rebranded Chinese Unitree, the price of which rose to over $16,000, about four times the actual price.

Currently, the Ukrainians use their robot dogs only for reconnaissance and reconnaissance purposes, just like the quadcopters that were initially used for personal use before it was realized that they could also be used for attack missions. Ukraine has a policy of taking people off the front lines and replacing them with technology wherever possible. They already use remote-controlled machine guns with video cameras known as Death Sickles; putting one on a four-legged robot would be a step forward in every sense of the word. And it would certainly terrify the Russians.