Dron ZP

Dron ZP is a Zaporizhzhia-based Ukrainian volunteer team building a ground-based answer to the FPV-drone threat: a remotely operated gun turret aimed at shooting hostile drones out of the sky rather than jamming them. Its flagship system, unveiled in January 2025, pairs a 12.7 mm machine gun with a night-vision sight and neural-network components that assist aiming, giving it what reporting describes as semi-autonomous targeting against fast-moving aerial targets. An operator works it through a joystick and monitor, and the turret is mounted on a trailer that must be towed into position. The group describes itself as a non-commercial effort, built by enthusiasts without state funding or backing from large foundations, with the intention of handing finished turrets to military units.

According to Militarnyi, the system was tested with soldiers of the unmanned-systems battalion of the 15th Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard, with early trials reported as successful; Zaporizhzhia-regional coverage has described it undergoing testing and combat deployment near a logistics base. Army Recognition notes the team is also developing more mobile solutions, including ground platforms that could carry such turrets or perform casualty evacuation; a 2024 volunteer crowdfunding effort raised 293,000 hryvnias toward one such ground platform.

Dron ZP belongs to the kinetic, “hard-kill” end of Ukraine’s counter-drone field — using guns and machine learning to track and hit fast-moving targets — a contrast to the electronic-warfare jammers and detection radars that other Ukrainian suppliers field against the same drones. The gun-turret approach has drawn growing interest as cheap FPV drones have saturated the front and as jamming alone has proven an incomplete defence: jammers can be defeated by drones that switch frequencies, fly on fibre-optic tethers or run on autonomous terminal guidance, and a turret that physically shoots an incoming drone down is indifferent to how it is controlled. A neural network helps the operator pick out and follow a small, fast target against a cluttered sky, where a human alone would struggle to react in time.