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UAV Procurement by Indian Army

  • 16 Jan 2021
  • 2 min read

Why in News

The Indian Army has signed a contract to buy high-altitude drones from ideaForge for USD 20 million.

  • ideaForge is a start-up founded and incubated by the alumni of Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B).
  • The contract is for a high-altitude variant of SWITCH UAV, an indigenous system used in surveillance operations.

Key Points

  • Significance of the Contract:
    • It marks a strategic shift of focusing on indegenous technologies in the Indian defence procurement process.
    • This is an example of how government-funded start-ups can help the country grow.
    • This is the biggest such order in terms of the contract value, for any Indian equipment manufacturer for drones.
  • Importance of UAV for the Army:
    • The Army has placed an order for the advanced high-altitude version of SWITCH UAV, a vertical take-off and landing drone. It is a fixed-wing hybrid Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Its features include:
      • Advanced flight time with a range of 15 km.
      • Around 2.6m long and 1.8m wide and weighs less than 6.5 kg.
      • Higher safety and simple operation with additional fail-safe redundancies.
      • Used for long-duration operations in harsh environments for day and night surveillance in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions.
      • Used in Photogrammetry - the technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant imagery.
  • Other Uses: Crowd Monitoring, Disaster Management, Precision Agriculture, Mining, etc.

Source: TH

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