A robotics company located in Hyderabad has presented a cutting-edge autonomous anti-drone device powered by artificial intelligence.
The system can guard not only critical sites such as nuclear power plants and oil rigs, but also a large area, even an entire city, from many drones of any kind. This is the first time in India that such a system has been built.
Grene Robotics, a deep-tech firm that specializes in offering AI-powered security solutions for the defense, enterprise, and government sectors, exhibited its advanced full-spectrum drone security system capability live on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
It is reported to be the world’s only wide-area Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System (C-UAS), known as Indrajaal. It can provide a complete and integrated security mechanism against moving threats that static defense systems cannot address.
Lieutenant General Gurmit Singh, Governor of Uttarakhand from 2014 to 2016, sees Indrajaal as a futuristic solution to India’s security concerns in the defense, public infrastructure, and commercial sectors.
“We will never forget the June 27, 2021 drone attack on the Jammu airport and the June 15 Galwan attack. At that time, we wondered what solution we had against drones and swarms.
Today, Indrajaal has given us the answer and shown that it is possible.”
According to Kiran Raju, the founder of Grene Robotics, which was founded 12 years ago, Indrajaal’s design employs a LEGO-like combination mechanism that provides 12 distinct levels of technology powered by artificial intelligence.
“The system provides 360-degree protection by detecting, identifying, classifying, tracking, and neutralizing threats in real time.” “The threat lifetime can range from 30 seconds to a few minutes,” Mr Raju explained.
Over a 4,000-square-kilometer region, Indrajaal is designed to defend against all classes and types of autonomous drones.
“From low radar cross section (RCS) threats to medium and high-altitude long endurance (MALE and HALE) UAVs, loitering munitions, smart bombs, rocket showers, nano and micro drones, swarm drones, and more, we have it all covered,” said Grene Robotics co-founder Wing Commander Sai Mallela.
He had previously assisted in the development of the Indian Air Force’s Integrated Air Command and Control System in order to transition to network-based operations, as well as in orchestrating a multi-million dollar import substitution for the forces.
Lt Col Gurmit Singh, who has led teams that patrolled the Line of Control in Kashmir and has also worked on border issues and counter-terrorism, said India has observed a considerable increase in hostile UAV activity in recent years.
This involves trips to surveil Indian security personnel as well as attempts to drop guns, money, and narcotics across the border into the Jammu and Punjab regions.
There were 76 documented occurrences of hostile UAV activity in India in 2020. This figure will rise to 109 in 2021 and 266 in 2022. There have already been 200 recorded cases in the first eight months of 2023, highlighting the need for increased monitoring and counter-measures to protect national security.
According to Mr Raju, we will witness a lot of drone activity in the near future, with 95% of them being benign drones rather than threats. “Indrajaal can distinguish between friendly and hostile drones.”
Mr Raju comments on the expense, “If I am building the Telangana secretariat for ₹ 200-300 crore, this system would cost about ₹ 5 crore. This is a typical capital infrastructure cost to protect what you are building.
For example, level 4 data centres have fire protection, and they also need drone protection as part of their capital infrastructure.”
Wing Commander Sai Mallela explains that present deployments have limits due to the inability of stand-alone technologies to be scalable or practicable. “Only radar-based detections are inaccurate when the radar cross section (RCS) is low and the detection is close to the ground.” They are even unable to recognize the radio frequency that is in use.”
Furthermore, jamming can only postpone an attack, not halt it. Laser weapons require a huge, stationary target, and there is no way to mitigate a swarm attack. Existing anti-UAV point defense systems rely on physical seeing, but drones are a moving target.
The developers of Indrajaal are confident that their system can protect large defense bases, areas such as the National Capital Region (NCR), which has several critical buildings, international borders, and prevent attacks against UAVs, low radar cross-section (RCS) missiles, smart munitions, and even swarm drones.
“A simple refinery oil field could be spread over 300-400 square kilometres. The uniqueness of this system is that it can be deployed as a single system over that entire area, ensuring no conflict of command and control, because there is a single decision center. This is a huge benefit in terms of operation, command and control, and costs. We are heavily indigenous, which is a significant step in itself,” states Wing Commander Sai Mallela.
