Israeli robotic defense firm sees ‘big change’ in unmanned combat

In a war everything changes, said Yossi Wolf, the CEO of Roboteam Defense. “You see it in Ukraine and the Israel Defense Forces,” he added. 

Speaking to Breaking Defense, Wolf was talking specifically of the explosion in use of unmanned systems, including ground robotics, which he said have been “very operational in the Gaza war.”  He said that prior to the conflict that began on Oct. 7 with the Hamas attack on Israel, robots were a relatively niche solution, and a more legally restricted one.

“Before the war you had no approval for having weapons on the robots,” he said. Now, he says Israel’s “big army,” meaning the regular infantry and armored divisions, have these approvals. “That’s the big change is that the big army put it in,” he said.

Also the military use of commercial unmanned platforms signified a “huge change from past,” he said.

In September 2023, just prior to the war, the Israel Defense Forces received a new Spark UAV which was deemed a “gateway” to fifth-generation drones. During the war the Israel Air Force also established a new drone squadron. Israel also rolled out unmanned M113s and also unmanned D-9 bulldozers. Wolf notes that the IDF began equipping small drones with grenades, an effort he credits to the IDF’s Yiftah unit, which specializes in developing new combat solutions. 

“We connect the drones with the unmanned ground vehicles [UGVs] and then you get a new orchestra of UGVs talking with each other and shooting,” he said.

As the battlefield was flooded with more types of unmanned technology it has also required that troops be trained in the use of these robots. Wolf said that the IDF now has at least three units focusing on teaching robotics. These include the Lotar elite counter-terrorism unit, as well as the combat engineers in Yahalom. In addition, the IDF’s school of engineering, called balatz, is focusing on robotics. He also said that many of the robotic solutions used by the IDF today are built in-house to some degree, meaning the IDF doesn’t need to acquire them from companies. For instance, the IDF has a large fleet of aging M113s, which could be reconfigured for these missions.

But when it looks to industry, Roboteam is one of the companies on which the IDF relies, according to Wolf. On the battlefield, Roboteam pioneered a solution called “Robox,” which is a kind of container that can be dropped in the field for troops. 

“They [the army] can put the container down, and it has a fleet of robots with large robots and a drone, and they enable regular infantry to keep the perimeter because it keeps distance between themselves and the enemy,” he said. 

The unmanned systems are also aided, but not directed, by artificial intelligence.

“No decisions are made automatically, but there are many AI features. For instance, better navigation or not flipping over … always a man in the loop. Usually three soldiers: one controls the vehicle, one controlling the weapon and one controlling the drone and they work together as a squad.” 

The vehicle could be a small, such as Roboteam’s MTGR, a tactical ground robot. It could also be larger, such as a six-wheeled UGV like Roboteam’s Rook, which is co-produced with Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems. 

The advantages of deploying these types of vehicles with drones is that they can accomplish a number of missions together, he said. The small robot can enter tunnels. The systems are at the front and are the first to be hit by enemy fire. That also means they need to be attritable and produced at scale. 

The use of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites has aided communication between the systems, he said.

“You don’t want just a patrol but each several hundred meters there is a robot [that is a] moving sensor and all the robots are in communication where they communicate with each other and the drone [even] in dead spots of communications the drone can cover it,” he said of a hypthetical patrol mission near the Jordanian border.

What he pointed to is these machines working together, rather than just having one UGV driving back-and-forth on a patrol, which would become predictable to an enemy trying to infiltrate a place — all they would have to do is wait for the machine to pass.  

Of course the global defense market has taken notice well beyond the borders of Israel. Wolf said Roboteam has seen interest from foreign European customers, such as Germany, in its container solution, that enables deploying several systems to the field, though he didn’t say if any orders had been finalized.