For example, the Navy will test its first sea-going autonomous boat with ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and other capabilities between Mumbai and Goa around November.
Sources told TOI that the first sea trials of the 15-metre long boat, capable of navigating through sea traffic, developed by the Navy’s Weapons and Electronic Systems Engineering Establishment (WESEE) and Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) will take place after the monsoon.
This is in line with the ‘Integrated Unmanned Roadmap’ drawn up by the Navy for induction of autonomous aerial, surface and underwater platforms of various sizes and types over the next 10 years. Countries such as the US and China have long been experimenting with a wide range of long-range unmanned surface and underwater vessels – much cheaper than manned warships and submarines – that could revolutionize warfare, such as hypersonic or directed-energy weapons.
The Indian Navy will also begin testing an indigenous new-generation Combat Management System (CMS), which acts as the “nerve centre” on the warship as it integrates all sensors such as radar, sonar and electronic warfare systems with weapons such as missiles, rockets, torpedoes and guns, as well as “interact” with other platforms through data links, from August.
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All warships commissioned from 2024 to 2029 will be equipped with this new CMS developed by WESEE, which enables advanced user-interface and faster response-time with inbuilt decision-support tools.
“CMS 24-29 with inbuilt-AI algorithms can do rapid threat assessment and suggest to the warship captain which particular weapon should be used in a particular situation. It can also talk to existing CMS on warships,” said the source. Collaboration between WESEE and production agency BEL has also seen the development of three variants of software-defined radios (SDRs) with top-level encryption, which are now replacing older VHF radio sets with limited bandwidth on board all warships, submarines and aircraft. While SDR-NC (Naval Communications) has already been deployed on all warships, installation of SDR-Tactical is currently underway. “The testing of the SDR-FA (fighter aircraft) will be completed within a year. Navy is the first service to develop and deploy such indigenous SDRs, which are multimedia capable and can send data over much longer distances,” said the source.
WESEE is also developing the new generation Data Link-II system, the older version of which is deployed on all warships, submarines, aircraft and shore installations of the Navy to promote network-centric operations. “This ambitious project aims to incorporate advanced features such as unified platform time synchronization, a modular and scalable open architecture equipped with multi-domain gateways, hot redundancy and fault tolerance.”