Expert Fedutinov named ways to protect drones from enemy jammers

In the future, drones will be able to do without an operator when selecting a target.

For the needs of the Northern Military District, a family of unmanned aerial vehicles “Supercam” is being created, including those that are maximally protected from the effects of enemy electronic warfare (EW) weapons. The head of one of the large state corporations announced this on Wednesday. An expert in the field of unmanned systems Denis Fedutinov told MK why this quality is important for drones and how they will develop in the future.

According to the expert, it is no coincidence that recently large corporations and companies that previously neglected unmanned aerial vehicles have taken a course towards the development and production of unmanned vehicles.

“State corporations began to increase the portfolio of companies involved in the process of creating unmanned vehicles,” said Fedutinov, “due to the high operational need for these systems today, as well as the expected increase in the scale of their use in the military and civilian spheres in the future. Moreover, the corresponding tasks for the development of the unmanned industry in the country were set at the presidential level. The state allocates hundreds of billions of rubles for these purposes.

According to the expert, tasks related to the creation of unmanned systems that take into account the requirements for reducing the influence of electronic warfare (EW) systems on them are now very relevant due to the unprecedented large-scale use of both powerful army EW systems and portable “jammers” in the Northern Military District zone. Such electronic warfare equipment, as a rule, jams the communication channel between the drone and the operator or affects the channel of satellite navigation systems, jamming it, or replacing real coordinates with fabricated ones.

“In order to minimize the risks associated with the loss of communication with an unmanned aerial vehicle,” Fedutinov noted, “it is necessary to increase their autonomy – a significant proportion of tasks must be performed automatically by drones. Moreover, in the future, we must be psychologically prepared for the fact that the decision to use weapons will also be delegated to robots.

As for satellite navigation interference, to ensure stable operation of a drone in the face of enemy electronic warfare, it is necessary to have several sources of navigation data. It is possible to duplicate data from the global navigation satellite systems GLONASS, American GPS, Chinese Beidou, and European Galileo, in particular, through navigation using an image of the underlying surface. Such solutions are not new ideologically and have already been implemented in one form or another, including in the context of unmanned systems.