IRV

IRV — Innovative Reconnaissance Products (Інноваційні Розвідувальні Вироби) — is a Lviv-based design bureau for unmanned autonomous systems. Alongside a line of FPV strike, assault and reconnaissance drones, reusable bombers and spare parts for Ukraine’s armed forces, it has become known for tracked unmanned ground vehicles. Its modular platform, the Vepryk (“Little Boar”), has been used for cargo runs, casualty evacuation, mine laying, fire support and one-way kamikaze missions. Building on that chassis, the company unveiled the Karakurt (“Black Widow”) at the IRON DEMO 2025 event near Lviv — an FPV drone-carrier system that mounts two launch rails holding six 13-inch FPV drones, letting a ground robot ferry the drones close to enemy positions and launch them remotely.

The design is meant to put drone launches well forward of operators. The platform can be driven up to about 4 km from its communication hub, while an onboard repeater or an aerial relay extends the drones’ reach to roughly 30 km. The system can launch two drones at once under a single controller to strike the same target, the second trailing the first by 30 to 40 metres. Each unit is priced at around UAH 2 million (about US$47,000) — a fraction of the cost of a single guided anti-tank missile, with the figure including drones, repeaters and software.

The system has seen frontline use: the company’s chief engineer, Andrii Malyshev, cited a record one-way flight of 32.5 km with a 2.6 kg payload, flown by Ukraine’s 42nd Brigade. IRV says it works directly with military units, iterating quickly, and has spoken of plans for AI-assisted drone swarming and landing systems for reusable bomber drones. Ukraine’s land-robotics sector has expanded rapidly, with the government-backed Brave1 cluster codifying dozens of domestic UGVs to NATO standards, though IRV has said it prefers to avoid formal codification in order to keep upgrading freely.