Dwarf Engineering

Dwarf Engineering is a Kyiv-based military-technology company building autonomy software that runs across different FPV-drone platforms rather than tying itself to a single airframe. Founded by a team that moved from web development into robotics — led by chief executive Vladyslav Piotrovskyi and chief technology officer Oleksandr Bakhmach — it positions itself as an infrastructure layer for Ukraine’s drone sector. Its foundation is KordycepsOS, a Linux-based operating system described as zero-trust and hardened against reverse-engineering, which runs on Raspberry Pi-class hardware, hosts the company’s autonomy modules and encrypts traffic between the drone and its control server. On top of that OS sits Narsil, a vision-based terminal-homing “copilot” designed to install on FPV drones regardless of size or payload, supporting digital and analog video links and thermal cameras. It works in two modes — a cruise mode that flies autonomously to a chosen point, and a refinement mode that homes onto a pilot-selected target — using inertial navigation and computer-vision visual odometry so a drone can complete a mission or return without a satellite signal, and continue when the operator’s link is jammed or lost.

Narsil was demonstrated publicly in August 2025 at a Ukrainian defence forum, where two drones running the module acquired and struck static targets without pilot assistance, flown by operators with no prior experience of the system; in one run an uncalibrated drone hit a moving ground robot under radio jamming. Brave1, Ukraine’s state defence-tech cluster, named the module a “Gamechanger” for FPV navigation AI at its Defence Tech Valley event the same year. By late 2025 the company reported a team of around 50, roughly 75 percent of its production localised in Ukraine, agreements with seven drone factories, thousands of test-flight hours and a first international customer in Japan, with plans to roughly double headcount through 2026.

Dwarf Engineering works in the same vision-guided FPV niche as The Fourth Law , Twist Robotics and Vyriy Drone , and partners with the manufacturer Drone Space Labs , whose Banderyk-24 kamikaze drone carries an automatic homing system the two firms tested together. As with most autonomy startups on the front, its hit-rate and capability figures come largely from the company and its demonstrations rather than from independent evaluation.