FPV AI Targeting Module

The FPV AI Targeting Module is a computer-vision software package built by Abto Software, a Lviv software house whose defence division emerged from the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Introduced in 2023, it addresses one of the most acute problems of the FPV drone war on the Eastern Front: the terminal seconds of an attack run, when Russian electronic warfare is most likely to sever the video link between the operator and the drone. Rather than steering the aircraft manually to impact, the pilot marks a target in the goggles’ feed and hands the final approach to the module, which is meant to hold the lock and drive the drone home without further input.

Abto describes the module as running entirely on the drone’s own compute — an approach the company frames as necessary for operation in GPS-denied and radio-contested environments where any dependence on an external link, whether satellite, ground station, or the operator’s own control signal, is a liability. The company has not publicly detailed the inference hardware or the specific model architecture, and independent teardowns of Ukrainian terminal-guidance modules recovered from the front have found a range of small single-board computers in this class rather than any single reference design. The operator selects a target in the video feed by drawing a bounding box; from that moment the module tracks that patch of pixels, adjusting flight-control commands to keep it centred as range collapses and the target’s apparent size grows. Rival Ukrainian defence-tech firms tackle the same tactical pattern with different bets about how to keep the lock when smoke, dust, or a violent evasive turn threatens to break it.

Ukrainian forces are the module’s only publicly acknowledged operator, and the war on the Eastern Front is its only known combat theatre. Abto has not published deployment numbers, unit types, or contract values, and Ukrainian procurement of software in this class typically flows through a mix of brigade-level purchases, volunteer funding, and centralised state contracts, so detailed figures rarely surface in open reporting.

The module sits inside a fast-moving Ukrainian software ecosystem that has grown around the FPV drone. Terminal-guidance kits have moved in three years from experimental fittings on a few thousand aircraft to a common option across many production lines, and Ukrainian defence officials have publicly described AI-assisted terminal guidance as the counter to jamming that gets a little harder to overcome every month. Abto’s contribution is one of several competing implementations of that idea, distinguished more by the software house’s engineering roots in commercial computer vision than by any headline capability claim.