No robot left behind: Ukraine’s new cargo UGV tows disabled ground robots off the front

A Kyiv-based builder has rolled out a heavy wheeled ground robot that can haul half a ton of supplies forward and then drag broken robots back for repair, closing a logistics gap that has, until now, forced infantry to crawl into the kill zone to retrieve their own machines.

The unmanned ground vehicle, named LOKO, was unveiled by developer NUMO Robotics at the Iron Halloween Party 2026 defense exhibition in early November.

The company says the vehicle has already been through combat trials and is now moving through codification, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense procedure that clears a system for official military use.

Each trip, LOKO can carry up to 500 kilograms of cargo, roughly 1,100 pounds. If a unit prefers, a smaller robot can simply ride on the flatbed.

The real novelty sits at the back: a tow hitch rated for 1,000 to 1,500 kilograms, meaning LOKO can hook onto a disabled UGV and drag it out of the fire zone to a repair point, according to spec data published by LB.ua.

Built for a robot logistics chain

Under the chassis sit four electric motors of 1.5 kW each, driving the wheels through a chain transmission. LOKO tops out at 20 km/h on hard surfaces and 12 km/h off-road, with a range of up to 80 kilometers on paved ground and 60 kilometers across terrain. It can run continuously for about five hours, and ground clearance is 200 mm.

Operators can control it over Starlink, LTE or Wi-Fi, with support for Silvus, DTC, Sine.Link and ELRS radio equipment, so a single unit can match whatever signal setup the sector allows.

NUMO Robotics CEO Anatolii Maksymchuk told Texty.org.ua that the platform came out of direct requests from front-line units for something that carries more per run, cuts the number of logistics trips, and can also recover damaged robots instead of leaving them behind.

Ukraine is now ordering ground robots by the thousand

LOKO is a single node in a network that scaled sharply this year. Ukraine’s Defence Procurement Agency contracted more than 22,000 unmanned ground vehicles in the first seven months of 2026, nearly double the full-year figure for 2025.

Most of those orders are logistics systems, followed by engineering platforms, with combat UGVs still a smaller share.

Since January, Ukrainian authorities have codified and authorized 67 new UGV models for operational use, all built by domestic producers. Military officials argue the shift keeps soldiers out of the most dangerous resupply and evacuation runs.

The self-recovery capability matters because disabled robots on the front have typically been written off, cannibalized by the enemy, or retrieved by crews moving under drone and artillery fire. A towing UGV folds that recovery job into the same autonomous chain that brought the load in.

Why the Pentagon is watching

US defense planners are tracking the same curve. The Pentagon committed more than $115 million to ground-robot projects in fiscal 2026, including about $92 million in Marine Corps ROGUE Fires orders and roughly $25 million for IBEX UGVs used by the Marines and the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment.

Overland AI, a Seattle-based autonomy startup, picked up $34 million in contract awards for autonomous breaching this past summer and fall.

US procurement still favors fewer, more autonomous systems over the cheap, attritable approach Ukraine has standardized. But the specific problems Ukrainian builders are solving, feeding forward positions and pulling broken machines out, are the same problems American planners will face if a larger ground-robot force ever meets an opponent that shoots back.

NUMO Robotics has not published a unit price for LOKO, and the codification timeline for state procurement has not been announced.

This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation