Multirole drones swarm into growing arsenal of Indian Army

With drones and their swarms being veritable buzzwords in today’s world of modern military operations, the Indian Army has announced the induction of these versatile force multipliers, writes ETV Bharat's Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: It’s a bird, it’s a plane, hell no, it’s a swarm of drones… With the induction of swarming drones, the Indian Army may well take pride over the ownership of the object of envy of its belligerent neighbours. On Friday, the Indian Army’s strategic communication wing tweeted: “#SwarmDrones being inducted into the Mechanised Forces, duly embracing the niche & disruptive technologies, will provide an edge to #IndianArmy in meeting future security challenges.”

“To induct this niche technology, the Indian Army has procured swarm drones from two Indian startup companies. In addition, Indian Army has also initiated a Make-II case Autonomous Surveillance and Armed Drone Swarm (ASADS) which includes a number of improvements and also a version for High Altitude Area.

To be operated by the Mechanised Infantry of the Indian Army, the ASADS has adequate operational ranges to neutralise adversary targets in depth. Explaining what necessitated the induction, a top source in the defence establishment said on condition of anonymity: “Recent incidents along our northern borders and the adverse relations with our western and northern neighbors necessitates induction of swarm drones providing tactical commanders with a force multiplier capable of providing surveillance inputs, undertaking close recce of a particular area to confirm inputs received from other ISR resources, engage varied targets like vehicles, artillery and air defence equipment, enemy command and control centres and opportunities.”

What’s more important and significant is that these drones are capable of both defensive and offensive operations. The drone swarm induction is taking place amid ongoing efforts by the Indian government to buy 30 ‘Predator’ (MQ-9) series drones from the US. The 30 ‘Predators’ will be divided equally among the Army, Navy and the Air Force.

In very recent times, drones have made a rather grand entry into the annals of the military world that has only been underlined by the startling successes of this particular tool of war in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the July 2020 Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Iran-backed Houthi drone attacks on Saudi Arabian oil refineries from faraway Yemen.

The swarm drone system consists of a ‘number of aerial vehicles’ which are Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled and capable of communicating with the control station as well as among themselves. AI-based swarming algorithms enable the swarm drones to automatically distribute the tasks among themselves, navigate to the area of interest, ensure collision avoidance during movement to the target area and carry out search of the area.

AI-based Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) feature enables the drones to automatically recognise targets line tanks, guns, vehicles and human and display it on the control station screen thus minimizing chances of the operator missing any target and also facilitating engagement by suitable type of weapon platform.