UAV INDIA Part 3: India’s Unmanned Aircraft Vision

The first slide you see shows an unmanned network centric battlefield scenario 2020 and is possibly the first such depiction by the Indian military research establishment (the Phantom Ray and Neuron are representative!). The second slide depicts India’s UAV roadmap as it stands today, seen here on LiveFist for the first time. Apart from the AURA, every other Indian UAV platform is either in trials or in some stage of prototype development. DRDO is now developing a Mk-II Nishant with higher endurance and service ceiling and an Mk-II Lakshya target drone with more autonomous features.

Copyright ADE/DRDO

6 thoughts on “UAV INDIA Part 3: India’s Unmanned Aircraft Vision”

  1. Hi Shiv,
    Does DRDO have specific features(need based) in mind for the different offerings? For example what would be the endurance required form the Asset at a Platoon level vs company level vs brigade level?

    The same can also be mapped for kind of cameras carried/resolution and recovery mechanism. Nishant needs to cut the flab and increase

    1. Endurance

    2. Payload capability

    3. Better engine

    Have any thought given to attach UAV's with the artillery to guide the shells in future?

    Anyway good intentions i will say but how fast do they deliver. Has Heli carried Namica finalised for trials? It will be important to arm Rustom

  2. Recent report says that govt. wants to hire helicopter from abroad. Does it not sound funny. It shows how much the army is prepared for a war. Does any body know when we are going to get 80 Mi17 helocopters from russia. Whether the delivery has started.
    Why these people cant go for more Dhruv. It is smaller than MI17 but it is better to have something of your own.

  3. Its good to see that they have visualised the warfare upto that date. Diagrams are good and look quite promising. But why is that there seems to be so much of a one-way data sharing?????? These should be connected through a network, shouldn't they be?????? The lines have an end and that definitely doesn't look good.

    Also are they thinking of sticking with the Nishant till 2020, because it seems to me as quite a basic UAV. They should definitely make these UAVs of future self-sufficient of searching, identifying, tracking and also make some UAVs meant for electronic countermeasures to fly with all manned and unmanned units. But they should always keep the trigger with a manned controller, no matter how advanced AI they may manage to develop in the next decade.

  4. One word comes to man regarding the expectations from the project – Surreal

    Combat UCAVs ? as opposed to BOMBER, SEAD, CADS

    A2A engagements and ESCORT UCAVS

    This is not how responsible product development takes place, there has to be phases, why create unnnatural expectations and then crib when people cant wait to take delivery !

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