UGV Laboratory

UGV Laboratory is a Ukrainian manufacturer of unmanned ground vehicles, best known for the four-wheeled Simba — a logistics robot built to carry supplies and mission-critical cargo to forward positions. The company has kept a deliberately low profile, surfacing publicly only as it began seeking international partnerships in 2026. The Simba carries payloads of more than 300 kilograms and has an operational range of roughly 70 kilometres.

In Ukraine, the Simba is used to resupply units on active duty, and crews have also pressed it into service evacuating wounded soldiers on return runs — a use the company notes is not officially certified. UGV Laboratory reports that a single platform has logged more than 1,600 kilometres across its missions, with one unit covering 384 kilometres before its first scheduled maintenance. Footage from the front has shown the robot completing night runs even after losing a wheel or being struck by an FPV drone. Control runs over Starlink , which the company concedes can be unreliable where dense forest interferes with the satellite link. The company says it updates the platform roughly every three months to keep pace with battlefield conditions, and is developing a variant fitted with a weapon turret.

The Simba reached the NATO Crystal Arrow 2026 exercise in Latvia in May 2026, where it served in a logistics role alongside other uncrewed platforms — and where the Baltic woodland tested the satellite-control link in ways Ukraine’s more open terrain had not. It has entered serial production in Ukraine, part of a national push — coordinated through the defence-tech cluster Brave1 — to field tens of thousands of ground robots for frontline logistics, a market also being chased by makers such as Tencore and Frontline .