Eurosatory 2024: Granta Autonomy personally testing its mini-UAVs over Ukraine’s front lines

There must be very few companies that personally test their products on the Ukrainian front line, but one that does is nascent Lithuanian mini-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) specialist Granta Autonomy.

Exhibiting at Eurosatory 2024, held in Paris from 17 to 21 June, Granta Autonomy’s stand even features surveillance footage of Russian troops in Ukraine recorded by its own UAVs during the week prior to the show.

Speaking to ESD at Eurosatory 2024 on 19 June, Granta Autonomy CEO Gediminas Guoba explained that the company, which was founded in 2009 as a software development company, started to work on UAVs in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“We became [military UAV] operators at that time and we already saw UAVs making a huge impact on the battlefield … and we said ‘OK, [this is] what we can do about trying to protect our country, creating such a capability.’ So that’s where we started, as a small company, creating UAVs as a side project, but from the beginning we knew that our UAV should work in Russian-occupied territory: it should be jamming resilient and it should work in a GNSS-denied environment.”

Granta Autonomy’s latest mini-UAV, developed using experience and feedback from previous systems, is the Hornet XR: a hand-launched system with a wingspan of 1.6 m, a length of 0.84 m, a weight of 2.9 kg, an endurance of three hours and a datalink range of at least 30 km. Electrically propelled, the Hornet XR is silent and hardly visible in the air. It can autonomously conduct pre-planned missions, even in absolute radio silence, and lands using a deep-stall method, meaning it can be landed in a confined area.

The company’s development of its own micro-gimbal-mounted electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) payloads is another story, said Guoba.

“From the beginning we were manufacturing quite small UAVs and there were no gimbals on the market for such small UAVs, so that’s why we started from the very beginning to manufacture our gimbals,” he explained.

Granta Autonomy is now on its fourth generation of gimbal-mounted EO/IR payloads that it has designed from scratch, from selecting the optical sensors to integrating them into the full payload. Its current two gimbal-mounted EO/IR payloads are the GS-214X and GS-218X. Measuring 71 mm³ and weighing just 180 g and 195 g respectively, these sensors feature an EO camera with a zoom capability of ×40 (×20 optical and ×2 digital), a horizontal field of view of 60° to 3° (optical) and 1.5° (digital), and a resolution of 1280×960 pixels. Both sensors feature a FLIR Boson+ 640 long-wave infrared sensor, which has a resolution of 640×512 pixels, with the GS-214X using a 14 mm lens offering a horizontal field of view of 32° and the GS-218X using an 18 mm lens offering a horizontal field of view of 24°.

As well as its own image processing technology, Granta Autonomy has developed its own Hornet Digital Data Link (DDL), which offers frequency ranges of 2300-3000 MHz and 4900-7200 MHz, flexible antenna options and improved performance in contested environments. The Hornet DDL, which weighs less than 50 g and consumes less than 10 W during active transmission, can achieve a video transmission range of 10 km with an omnidirectional antenna and 30+ km with a directional antenna.

From 2022, following Russia’s wholesale invasion of Ukraine, Granta Autonomy established contact with volunteers fighting there, some of whom were from Lithuania, and secured funding from Lithuanian and Ukrainian sources to start sending its UAVs to the Ukrainian front line.

“Last year we spent quite a lot of time in Ukraine testing our datalinks employee and improving them, and now we have a system that is completely jamming resilient,” said Guoba. “We were doing tests in Ukrainian fields and tests behind enemy lines flying above Russian [troops] you didn’t see any impact on our system.

“Last week I was in Ukraine again and we were testing this UAV [the Hornet XR] with special operation forces behind enemy lines and the idea was very simple: this UAV is one of the smallest UAVs at the front lines … so for special operations forces that small footprint and lightweight capability is very interesting and we were testing in the real environment, in the battlefield, to ensure this UAV is [what they need] and is capable of flying in a very complicated electronic warfare environment.”

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian regular army has had a battery of Granta Autonomy UAVs since last autumn following trials conducted in May last year, funded by the Lithuanian and other European ministries of defence (MoDs).

When asked by ESD how many of the company’s UAVs are in Ukraine, Guoba noted that it is currently a two-digit number, but will reach three digits by the end of this year. Based in Vilnius, Granta Autonomy is well placed to serve Ukraine’s mini-UAV needs for a variety of reasons.

“First of all, being close to Russia, for the last 10 years what was in our minds is what we should do to create a UAV that is resilient to their equipment and I would say now the most important thing for us, and why we can do a lot better and get feedback almost immediately is, first of all, in 20 hours of driving we can be at the front lines, testing our equipment in the real environment,” Guoba explained.

“Another thing: we came from the Soviet Union, over 30 years ago, and speaking for myself I’m from that generation who still speaks Russian, and that makes things in Ukraine much, much easier because you can speak with soldiers, gather facts from direct feedback from them,” he added.

Regarding Granta Autonomy’s domestic market, the company secured its first orders from the Lithuanian armed forces, for its first-generation systems, in 2018, but has since supplied more.

“Last year the Lithuanian MoD sent our UAVs to Ukraine and now this year, just a month ago, the [Lithuanian] armed forces also bought our UAVs,” said Guoba, noting that these would be the latest third-generation systems.

So far just a small number of UAVs have been purchased for trials, but Guoba noted that the Lithuanian armed forces have a requirement for around 50 mini-UAVs, which they plan to purchase this year.

Guoba said he is confident Granta Autonomy has steamlined its manufacturing to respond to larger volumes of UAVs being ordered, although did concede that, such is the current demand for UAVs in general, acquiring certain critical components could at some point become problematic.