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Is this such a far-fetched wunderwaffe to be holding out for at this point? Between the ChatGPT-plays-geoguessr posts, the circumstance that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech (currently still using human operators), and them having access to much more infrastructure that would enable the technology's deployment once it is created (unsanctioned supply chains, Starlink), the bet that these will happen in the next 2 years and will be a significant game-changer seems at least as good to me as the "Russia will run out of missiles any moment now" cope of the early months of the war.
According to the people operating it, their tech is not superior to the Russian one. This is from fall of '24
Now look how wikipedia puts it
I understand why people want to believe in the narrative of Ukrainian tech superiority and why Wikipedia selectively quotes the same article to make it look like Ukrainians are out-innovating Russians, but it's mostly unwarranted. They're basically the same people with a slightly different culture. The difference between Russians and Ukrainians is that Russians have more resources and people, possibly mitigated by a less flexible MoD.
Making such a tech 'safe' would require putting some sort of transponders on every piece of Ukrainian equipment and making such network secure and hard to exploit - the codes would have to change frequently etc. This is hard, logistically, there are spies in the Ukrainian army etc.
Without that, your only bet would be having AI modules on drones that would only activate once the drone is indisputably in enemy territory. How do you make that in a foolproof manner? Inertial navigation of some sort? You could use terrain / map matching but that's a whole another layer of of AI complexity you'd need to make reliable.
But what then if someone fires off the drone in the opposite direction to the front ? Both sides routinely used basically civilian vehicles for transport and transport is one of the primary targets. Any misactivation would result in grief.
In addition, FPV cameras are fairly cheap and low resolution, they AFAIK always rely on recon from another drone. An autonomous drone would require better sensors.
There's a fair amount of complications. I'd not rule this out before war ends, but I think it's more likely to happen after the war. Maybe Ukrainians will get last-40m targetting or something like that, which could really help radio-shadow near the ground.
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