City-based ‘Grene Robotics’ claimed to have designed and developed a 100% indigenous ‘unified, distributed and wide-area autonomous drone defence dome called ‘Indrajaal’ which can protect a large area of 1000-2000 sq. km per system against threats such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), incoming weapons, loitering munitions and the like, autonomously.

The firm, working on the defence operating systems for the last eight years, says that Indrajaal’'s design principles are based on delivering autonomy to the defence forces leveraging a combination of 10 modern technologies powered by artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and robotics.

“Indrajaal is capable of identifying, assessing, deciding, acting and evolving autonomously in real-time, round the clock. Whether the threat is single or multiple or a combination of UAVs, loitering munitions and such, the system is capable of countering all such threats. It can be integrated with the current weapons infrastructure,” said executive director Gopi Reddy on Wednesday.

In an exclusive interaction, Mr. Reddy said modern warfare was driven by AI and Robotics, hence, he was of the opinion that the Armed Forces should consider going for a holistic solution of defence shield to identify, assess and act an incoming weapons system either to neutralise, capture or stall them in real time with the commanding officer concerned having the command-control.

Recent drone attacks in Jammu & Kashmir and the developments across the China border are sufficient indicators of usage of cutting edge technologies like UAVs and smart swarms and the country can ill-afford to depend on manual weapons or ‘point based weapons alone’, he maintained.

About half a dozen or more Indrajaal systems with seamless connectivity can protect the entire western border from Rann of Kutch to Kashmir within a few months rather than install 300-point defence anti-UAV systems at a great cost. Grene Robotics has already simulated the models to the defence personnel and talks are on with the public sector giant to scale up and implement the defence shield, explained Mr. Reddy.

“We have been working on Indrajaal for last two years. Once approved, we can set up a pilot plant covering 100-250 sq. km in 90-120 days and up to 2,000 sq. km in three months from there. We can work with legacy systems or deploy new ones using our data,” said the ED.

“Conventional defences will be overwhelmed in a swarm attack scenario and an AI-enabled autonomous dome with its own ecosystem of sensors and processing is the way forward,” said CEO-defence Wg Cdr MVN Sai (Retd), involved in design and setup of the Indian Air Force command and control system. The firm is currently partnering with Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) to jointly develop an autonomous air defence technology.