FPV Terminal Guidance AI

FPV Terminal Guidance AI is a computer-vision targeting module from Abto Software, a Lviv software house whose defence division has focused on optical guidance and drone navigation. First surfaced around 2023, it is designed to run onboard a first-person-view strike drone and take over control in the final seconds of an attack — the moment at which the operator’s video and radio link to the aircraft are most likely to be lost to Russian electronic warfare.

The problem the module addresses is the central weakness of the FPV strike loop as it is currently flown in Ukraine. The pilot steers the drone by an analogue video downlink, and the closer the aircraft gets to a defended target the more likely it is that the link will drop into noise. Terminal guidance software of this class runs object-detection and tracking models directly on the drone’s onboard compute — typically a low-cost NVIDIA Jetson or comparable system-on-module — and lets the operator select a target while the link is still stable, at which point the aircraft continues to steer itself into that object even if GPS and comms are denied for the final approach. Abto’s public material presents the software as intended to be integrated into existing Ukrainian FPV airframes rather than sold as a complete drone, and does not disclose the underlying model architecture or training data.

Ukraine is the disclosed operator. No unit counts have been published, and the specific frames the software flies on are not named in the open. Independent coverage of the broader category — a growing catalogue of Ukrainian-built terminal-guidance kits from several defence-tech firms — indicates that AI-guided FPVs have moved from experimental use in late 2023 to routine deployment across the front, though attribution of any given strike to any given vendor is rarely possible from open-source footage alone.

Abto’s module sits inside one of the most closely watched software races of the war. Russian channels have reported recovering Ukrainian drones with terminal-lock behaviour of this kind, and Russian FPV programmes have begun publicising their own equivalents. The measure of an effective terminal-guidance module is how reliably it can hold a lock on a moving armoured vehicle through smoke, dust and adversarial camouflage, and how cheaply the inference stack can be built into an airframe that is meant to be expended in a single flight.