Ukrainian Drone Holds Position for 6 Weeks

Are these called drones? I thought drones flew.

The article calls this a "Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle armed with a machine gun" and the headline calls it a "Ukrainian Combat Robot". Not a "drone" like the submitter's title has.

Edit: it seems like the creator calls it a "droid". Is that just them, or is that becoming standard terminology for a kind of ground-based "soldier-robot"? See:

https://devdroid.tech/en/catalog/droid-tw

Reading between the lines of the article it seems advanced but not too surprising.

I assume that at night when it "withdrew to a covered location" there was opportunity for maintenance, battery swaps, etc.

The article says that it successfully carried out "multiple calls for fire." That sounds like over those 45 days there were multiple missions to provide suppressive fire. They're not explicit about what that means but it sounds like, "if you see anything moving in this arc, take a few shots at them". Presumably there's some AI to prevent it from wasting ammo on really dumb decoys.

A "simple" mobile automated turret has been around for a while. The novelty they would be demonstrating is essentially battlefield robustness. They aren't claiming that this machine can operate completely autonomously for 6 weeks but the incremental pieces are still hard.

Nice marketing pitch. In reality it was probably parked at an empty crossroads 10 miles behind the frontline, taking potshots at "suspected" enemy positions.

This is a standard unit from DevDroid.[1] Here's the marketing video.[2] It's available for pre-order. They also have a model with a grenade launcher.

[1] https://devdroid.tech/en/catalog/droid-tw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oay_-cAlLXE

Someone here said "[Russian] tactical units", "smoke grenades". They must be joking.

A drone like this is defending against 2-3 50-year-olds without military experience wading through a bombed out tree-line into almost certain death, because there are literal firing squads waiting if they don't. With a huge round like 12.7, all you have to do is fire pot shots in the general vicinity while drone pilots do the rest. Also, these can be life-savers for an outpost when weather conditions ground all drones.

This is a fluff piece, but these machines might become very real very soon. They're already used for resupply and dropping mines. We have plenty of videos of that from both sides. A few months ago we had a video of one of these taking out an infantry carrier. This is not vaporware. It's a bad approach at worst, but I wouldn't be surprised if this grows exponentially for many years to come.

[delayed]

We really are trying our best to make Terminator reality aren't we?

I’ve been wondering when modern battlefields would get Team Fortress 2 sentries.

My car also held position for 6 weeks during the winter storms

So what happens in a few years when a submarine pulls up some miles off US coast and unleashes 100 super-automated drones to terrorize the country?

Heck maybe not even a sub needed, some smaller country could have an automated tiny raft too small to be seen on radar tow in the drones

They could charge via phantom power from powerlines and will find a way around GPS jamming

This is on my 2026 bingo card of things that never happened.

The proportion of videos featuring drones taking out other drones is increasing.

"It takes infantry to hold territory" is still true I guess, but now it's a single operator in a bunker.

Is there some sort of hybrid flying/stationary drone that flys in an sits to hold a ground position?

looks like a treadmill

Not a drone...

Are these the ones controlled by Steam Decks?

This smells more like military propagand, i.e., bullshit.

There is no way this is honest or real, i.e., it somehow fought off a tactical unit trying to take the frontline that this drone was holding? Or was it just parked in some area where there was no tactical point of even taking the territory?

Just by virtue of its nature, a single drone and/or a well placed dumb grenade, not even to mention likely a smoke grenade could have easily defeated this thing within seconds of deployment if there was any interest in taking the area this toy was "controlling".

Someone is doing a literal con job to get military graft and fraud contracts.