On 4 September, Kyiv hosted a workshop on swarm-intelligence technologies, bringing together 55 specialists from Ukraine’s miltech industry — operators, representatives of sector associations, and companies’ technical leads. The event was organised by DK NEJET, a Ukrainian-Latvian company developing autonomous systems for FPV drones and working on swarming technologies, in partnership with the IT Ukraine Association. The keynote speaker was Norwegian scientist Jan Bjørknes, who specialises in robotics and the swarming of autonomous systems.
The key message of Bjørknes’s talk: a group can “know” what none of its members knows individually.
As an example, he cited the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum: when food becomes scarce, thousands of individual cells unite into a single organism that, for a few hours, gains the ability to orient itself towards light and crawl towards it.
His team reproduced this principle using swarms of miniature e-puck robots at the Bristol Robotics Lab. No single robot knew where the light source was, but the group found it collectively. The minimum number of agents at which this collective behaviour emerges is exactly three, Bjørknes notes: two robots never find the target, while three do so reliably every time.
The main challenge the scientist outlined is how to ensure that a larger number of drones in the field can be controlled by a smaller number of operators. The number of systems is growing, while there may be a shortage of trained pilots.
According to him, there is a clear boundary between two levels:
- Automation — when a drone’s flight controller simply holds a bank angle or flies along a set trajectory. This is technology readiness level 9 (fully proven, commercially available, costs next to nothing).
- Autonomy — when a drone responds to sensor data and independently replans its actions.
Above all of that is the swarming level, where drones enter into strategic interaction: they vote, negotiate, argue and even “trade” with one another using auction mechanisms — to collectively decide who takes which target, without a single “top-down” command for every step.
He said the hardest part here is not the mathematics, which has already been well worked out academically, but the concepts of use: how to integrate swarms of autonomous drones into real combat scenarios.
“You can’t just turn up and say: a swarm is good, a swarm is cool, so let’s build it. The miltech industry is genuinely divided: there are those on the front line who need systems that simply work, and there are those in R&D (research and development). And there is often a lack of understanding of what exactly we want from a swarm,” the scientist noted.
Bjørknes said the Ukrainian audience turned out to be the most polarised of those he has worked with. “Some people in the room felt there simply isn’t time for research right now. Others objected, saying that research is preparation for what will happen in a few months. That tension was at the heart of the discussion,” he added.
Jan Dyre Bjørknes is a Norwegian researcher into the swarming of autonomous systems. He holds a PhD from the University of the West of England in Bristol and has published on the fault tolerance and scalability of robotic swarms. He is the Chief Technology Officer of Six Robotics, a company that, under licence from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), is bringing the Valkyrie swarming platform into series production. The Norwegian Army received the first such swarm on 16 October 2025.
DK NEJET is a Ukrainian-Latvian company founded in 2018 which, since 2023, has been a systems supplier of UAVs to units of the Defence Forces. Its production facilities are located in Ukraine and Latvia, and in January 2026 the company opened an office in Trondheim, Norway. It develops FPV kamikaze drones, interceptor drones, fibre-optic drones and ground stations; its platforms are NATO-codified.
The stated development focus is autonomous coordination, in which one operator can control several dozen drones simultaneously. According to the company’s co-founder Alberts Spīla, it produced 14,000 drones last year and plans 40,000 for 2026.