The Indian Army has signed a deal to a private start-up company founded by IIT-B alumni to build and supply advanced tactical drones worth ?130 crore to the Indian Army. This is the biggest such order in terms of the contract value, for any Indian equipment manufacturer for drones.
The start-up beat top Israeli and Indian drone manufacturers to get the coveted contract, will be providing an undisclosed number of drones that can operate at higher altitudes, to the armed forces. A high-altitude variant of the company’s Switch UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) will be delivered over a period of a year.
The company, ideaForge, was incubated in 2007 at the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE). While initially, they built hand-cranked chargers, the enterprise soon shifted gears to building a hovercraft and eventually entered the drone manufacturing market. The company is a licensed manufacturer of UAVs approved by the Ministry of Defence.
Based in Mumbai, currently, the company offers seven UAVs that are used in a range of applications including mapping, traffic management, surveillance, crowd management and security. Some of these drones are already in use by the armed forces.
The Switch UAV is a fixed-wing vertical take-off and landing UAV that can be deployed at high altitude and harsh environments for day and night surveillance in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions. It is man-portable and has the highest time on target compared to any other UAV in its class.
The advanced high-altitude SWITCH, with vertical take-off and landing, is a fixed-wing hybrid UAV. It’s 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 harsh environments for day and night surveillance in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions
