At a secret workshop in Ukraine’s north-east, where about 20 people assemble hundreds of FPV (first person view) drones, there is a new design. Under the frame of the familiar quadcopter is a cylinder, the size of a forearm. Coiled up inside is fibre optic cable, 10km (6 miles) or even 20km long, to create a wired kamikaze drone.
Capt Yuriy Fedorenko, the commander of a specialist drone unit, the Achilles regiment, says fibre optic drones were an experimental response to battlefield jamming and rapidly took off late last year. With no radio connection, they cannot be jammed, are difficult to detect and able to fly in ways conventional FPV drones cannot.
“If pilots are experienced, they can fly these drones very low and between the trees in a forest or tree line. If you are flying with a regular drone, the trees block the signal unless you have a re-transmitter close,” he observes. Where tree lined supply roads were thought safer, fibre optic drones have been able to get through.
Those news are already not so new any more. We’ve had reports of those two months ago.
Since fiber optic wire guided missiles exist it’s not that much of a leak to think it should work with drones too, so long as the weight works out.
Fiber is really really thin. 9 micrometer core diameter and 125 micrometer cladding diameter (incl core). The 10 km spools we use in our lab for network equipment testing are boxes of only like 20x20x10cm, and those aren’t optimized to be extra small with bend insensitive fiber. I can totally believe the 1.2-1.4 kg for 10 km in the article.