One of India’s key player in Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS),ideaForge recently unveiled its the most ambitious product ‘NETRA 5’. At a time when globally borders are having several challenges,this product is designed for defence and security operations in challenging environments where missions face constant threats. In an exclusive interview, Mr. Rahul Singh, Co-founder and VP Engineering, ideaForge explains Vishal Kashyap, Managing Editor, Aviation World about technical capabilities of Netra5 and ideaForge vision towards indigenisation. Excerpts:
Kindly brief about ideaForge, its works and plans ahead?
ideaForge represents one of the most pioneering efforts in driving cutting edge, autonomous, Indian drone products. We are present for more than a decade now. The company was founded in 2007 and has focused on creating the best in class unmanned aerial systems of India particularly for the domestic needs and for the global as well. Our latest product NETRA 5, which was officially launched at the Aero India 2025 represents the culmination of advanced technologies that we have brought to this class of products so far.
What is NETRA 5 and its USP for the Indian market?
NETRA 5 builds on the long legacy of the NETRA range of products which have been used by our domestic customers for more than a decade. The latest version of NETRA not just inherits but builds on the strengths of what the previous products were. The three pillars of our product philosophy are performance, reliability and autonomy.
So this NETRA 5 version extends the performance to deliver a class leading performance of more than 75 minutes with a built-in multi-sensor dual payload. It has the ability to attach a variety of secondary payloads while still inheriting the capability of the primary payload on the platform. On terms of the reliability, the product extends the reliable operation and autonomous operation with a host of new technologies. It builds in all direction obstacle avoidance which increases the availability and reliability of the operation that the product is doing. The product also comes built in with advanced vision based navigation systems which enable it to survive GPS jamming and GPS denial kind of challenging environments and increasing the availability of the system in the most contested environments.
What are the technical capabilities of NETRA 5 ?
In terms of its communication capability, NETRA 5 comes with a built-in frequency hopping kind of a scenario where it’s able to have a higher resistance to communication jamming attempts as well. It further provides an insight to what is happening and what the aircraft is seeing even in the most jammed and contested environments. This whole product still remains back packable and a single man can carry it on the field and deploy it in a matter of minutes and be able to achieve a variety of applications. This particular product will be available for all sorts of applications from military to enterprise and civilian applications, domestic as well as international positioning.
“NETRA 5 is a one man portable system capable of delivering more than 75 minutes of endurance with a dual payload. It is capable of doing operations up to 5000 meter plus take-off altitude serving very high altitude applications. It has the capability of carrying an additional 2 kg payload for a variety of applications. It could be carrying a radar or a multispectral camera or any of the search and rescue related other payloads which may be required. These payloads can also be attached by third party value added partners who may have specialised payloads for various applications and the aircraft provides compatibility to all those third party payloads.”
NETRA 5 UAV ( Pix Courtesy: ideaForge)
Can you elaborate on the third party payload supplier? What are threats attached to it?
A third party payload supplier could be someone specialising in for example a radar sensor, someone specialising in an agri-specific multi-spectral sensor, or an inspection related sensor, etc. For a variety of applications there are third party service providers who are specialists in various applications who can mount their sensors onto this platform and inherit all the high performance specifications and make that sensor data available with the combination of these high performance specifications.
While doing this we have also focused a lot on indigenisation which use to be our core theme. We have been the loudest voice for many years focusing on at least technologies of critical nature coming from geographies of concern. The whole technology stack in a graded risk manner and the most critical part are the critical components which handle data or control the communication of the aircraft which would include the core autopilot or the communication related systems, or even any data recording or payload related systems. All of these coming from any country of concern is a strategic risk for any critical application which will use it.
All the products that we supply today are free of any critical component coming from any country of concern. On top of that we are taking this whole effort further while we provide a 100% assurance of no critical component coming from any country of concern.
What are the other invisible challenges of the sector and steps to overcome them?
The second layer of concern lies with the supply chain deniability. For example, if there is a specialised technology and the country denies to export the same. IdeaForge is in process to indigenise a lot of critical technologies like motors, composite manufacturing to happen in India.
We are working with a handful of various smaller companies in the country who are specialised in these components and we are providing full support for these companies to come up and be a strong local ecosystem which will support all these critical technologies. So as a combination of zero critical subsistence coming from areas of countries of concern and all the other specialised technologies being made by the local ecosystem. I think this area is something that we are in a very good place to assure our customers that there is no concern in terms of supply chain vulnerability or supply chain denial that our products are exposed to.
How much secured is NETRA 5 to counter cyber attacks and jamming?
This is also related to sourcing components from areas of geographical concern. We see jamming and hacking as two parallel concepts and we assure that hacking is something which is not a problem at all with systems which have very high level of encryption security implemented in them. All of our products today assure a very high level of encryption eliminating the possibility of hacking.
But jamming is something like playing a very loud loudspeaker in an area and you not being able to hear something. So jamming is real and it happens in a real life environment. The older systems which are not built with any particular technology for jamming resistance do end up suffering where the communication may get lost or GPS may get lost. In those cases an expected behaviour happens where if their GPS is available the UAV will come back and land at the home position. But, if the GPS is not available the aircraft may continue drifting with the wind in a particular direction.
Now, with all the latest products we have technologies to continue operating in GPS jamming and communication jamming environment as well. All of these technologies are not available to all of our users to integrate so that their operational availability in contested environments becomes more assured than it used to be.
What are the primary areas where drones are basically used in India?
Broadly we make dual use technologies, which means our products have a very strong application in a lot of security and surveillance applications. It can be used by MoD, MHA or any of the other public law enforcement agencies to ensure security and surveillance related requirements. It can vary from border management to traffic management to beat patrolling and things like that.
On the other side of the dual use, we also serve a lot of enterprise applications where our products are used for large scale mapping and surveying applications. They can be used in mining industry or long road infrastructure and other infrastructure development projects. They could also be used to do terrain study for flood management, for forestation related efforts.
We are taking these applications not just in the domestic industry but also taking it to the international industry. One added part of this is since the last year we have also started offering some of these aspects as drone as a service where our product called Flight offers drone as a service product.
Do you also have global footprints?
We have a fully owned subsidiary in the US, ideaForge Technology Inc. which is working with American public safety agencies and other customers to expand the potential of our products in that market. So US remains a large part of our focus area apart from India and the rest of the world remains a subsequent sort of third focus.
