An Indian company has won a global contract to supply 200 mini-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to the Indian Army that will be used in surveillance activity during wartime and peace operations.
ideaForge, which was founded in 2007 by graduates from IIT, Bombay, won the contract to supply its UAV named Switch in a tender bid where companies from Israel, Russia, Ukraine, France apart from other Indian companies had registered their interest.
It was awarded the contract after emerging successful in the rigorous testing and field trials that the Indian Army carried out. These 200 systems will be delivered within two years of the signing of the contract. The company was incubated in 2007 at the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) at IIT-B by four alumni members—Ankit Mehta, Rahul Singh, Ashish Bhat and Vipul Joshi. The company has, in the recent past, delivered a high altitude version of the same Switch UAV to Indian army apart from supplying it to Central Armed Police Forces.
Company sources said that Switch was selected by the army due to the fact that it was half the weight of its nearest competitor without compromising on its performance which made it much easier to carry it to the last mile, an important criterion considering the deployment conditions.
“Some of the competitors were unable to meet the landing requirements, but Switch was able to do it and it met all other requirements in tests that were conducted across multiple terrain and seasons,” a company official told The Daily Guardian. The organization is a licensed manufacturer of UAVs approved by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
“On analyzing the actual operational constraints that the Army faced, ideaForge realized that a Hybrid Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) platform which can take off without a runway or by hand launching, would be the ideal solution,” the official said.
Ankit Mehta, ideaForge Co-Founder and CEO , in a media statement, said: “ideaForge has engineered this product with the unique VTOL approach keeping in mind the terrain challenges in the operational areas of the Indian Army. Our drones are ‘Built like a bird and tested like a tank’, an expression we coined as our systems were undergoing the harshest field trials and lab testing as a part of our journey to bagging this contract.”
Switch UAV will be used by the Army for long duration operations, long endurance surveillance and security, inspection and photogrammetry. The 7 kg UAV can fly for 2 hours and cover a distance of 15 Km. It is IP53 dust and water resistant certified. It can fly at a height of 1000 meter above ground level and is equipped with a camera that can click pictures at 1280 x 720 pixels with 25x Optical Zoom in day light and has a thermal camera capacity of 640 x 480 pixels.