Ukrainian defense firms The Fourth Law and TAF Industries have certified an FPV strike drone that reaches out about 25 miles (40 km) and completes its attack run without a pilot on the sticks. The Kolibri 10 Advance pairs TAF’s mass-produced airframe with an AI guidance module called TFL-1, and Ukraine’s defense forces can order it today through state procurement channels. The companies started the joint project this spring and turned it into an orderable product in months.
I’ve followed The Fourth Law’s guidance modules since last October, and every announcement since has pushed machine autonomy one notch deeper into routine procurement. This one puts it on a high-volume production line: tens of thousands of drones fitted with TFL modules roll off Ukrainian assembly lines every month, according to reporting by The Defender.
The Operator Picks The Target, The Drone Finishes The Job #
The system runs what The Fourth Law calls Level 1 autonomy: an operator designates a target from up to 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) away, including a vehicle moving at 50 mph (80 km/h), and the drone then switches to autonomous mode, locks on, and completes the strike by itself.
That final stretch is exactly where Russian jamming bites hardest. According to Militarnyi, the drone carries out its mission even after a complete loss of communication with the operator, the moment when a manually flown FPV goes blind and usually drops out of the sky.
Be precise about what this is and what it is not. A human still finds the target and commits the strike. The machine only owns the terminal phase, the last dash after lock, and nobody has claimed this drone hunts on its own.
The Fourth Law has laid out a staged roadmap for its modules that begins with terminal guidance and runs toward autonomous search and destroy, according to TechUkraine’s profile of the company. The Kolibri integration sits on the first rung of that ladder.
The Range Number Comes With Fine Print #
Militarnyi puts the Kolibri 10 Advance’s reach at more than 24.9 miles (40 km), credited to dual-band communications and a high-capacity battery, yet specifications the companies shared with The Defender days earlier list a strike range of 9.3 to 18.6 miles (15 to 30 km) depending on warhead weight.
Both numbers can be true at once. Maximum reach with a light load is one figure, and combat radius with 2.2 to 8.8 pounds (1 to 4 kg) of warhead strapped underneath is another. Neither company has broken down the flight profile behind the 40 km claim, so read it as a ceiling rather than a mission plan.
The drone operates at altitudes up to 6,560 feet (2 km), per the published specs. The sales pitch, as The Defender reports it, is hitting targets under intense enemy electronic warfare or beyond the radio horizon, engagements a standard radio-linked FPV cannot attempt at all.
The Drone Is Already On Ukraine’s Order Books #
The developers say the certified drone is available to Ukrainian defense forces right now through the DOT-Chain procurement system and on the Brave1 Market platform, with the option to buy under the eBall program, the points system that turns confirmed strikes into extra purchasing power for frontline units.
The module inside arrives with a combat record. Pilots have flown drones carrying the TFL-1 since March 2025, Colonel Ruslan Shevchuk told TechUkraine, and dozens of Ukrainian units now field the technology. The Defender reported last September that TFL-1 had also received NATO codification.
The pricing history makes the math easy to run. When manufacturer Vyriy paired the same module with its own airframe in September 2025, the combined drone listed at 18,500 hryvnias, about $448 at the time, per The Defender. The Fourth Law’s CEO said then that the system raised drone cost by roughly 10 percent while multiplying strike effectiveness two to four times.
Take the company’s own numbers and the arithmetic gets blunt. A 10 to 20 percent cost bump for two to four times the hits cuts the price of each successful strike by roughly 40 to 70 percent. Those are manufacturer claims rather than independent test data, but procurement offices make buying decisions on exactly this kind of math.
DroneXL’s Take #
The range number is the least interesting thing about this drone. The story is distribution. Autonomy stopped being a lab demo and became a line item soldiers can order with reward points.
When I wrote Ukraine’s AI Drone Revolution Hits Hardware Reality last October, last-mile targeting was already standard practice across Ukraine’s FPV fleet, and The Fourth Law’s vision modules were selling for around $70. In April I covered founder Yaroslav Azhnyuk again, when investors lined up behind his pilotless strike drones. The Kolibri deal extends that same straight line: the module moved from retrofit kits to a certified, state-catalogued drone from one of the country’s biggest FPV producers.
What I keep watching is the gap between the levels. Level 1 means a human picks every single target, and my October reporting found Ukraine deliberately keeps deep-strike target selection human because those drones spend hours over civilian areas. The distance between terminal guidance and autonomous search and destroy is not an engineering detail. It is the whole ethical argument about this class of weapon, compressed into a firmware roadmap.
Whether the 40 km figure survives contact with a full warhead and frontline jamming is an open question, not a prediction. Neither company has published loaded-range test data, and the certification paperwork doesn’t answer it. Until someone does, 25 miles is a spec sheet number. The $448 price from last September’s Vyriy pairing is real, though. That money buys a guided strike aircraft for less than many hobby camera drones cost, and that comparison is the one worth sitting with.
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