The Izhevsk-based Kupol Electro-Mechanical Factory has developed a target system with different types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that allows anti-aircraft gunners to practice repelling an attack by a ‘swarm’ of drones, Kupol Director for Military-Technical Cooperation and Defense Procurement Igor Ivanov said on Thursday, Trend reports referring to TASS.
"The specific feature [of the Adyutant system that simulates a ‘swarm’ of drones] is that under the control of one ground-based command post, two operators can simultaneously launch up to six air targets and operate them in the single field. That is, we create a target ‘swarm’ consisting of various types of targets," Ivanov said.
The Kupol official who is also the director of the Target Systems project noted that drones with various characteristics help simulate an air situation maximally close to a real combat environment.
"Some fly low, others fly high, quickly or slowly and so on. This helps create the effect of a situation maximally close to a real combat," he said.
Initially, the system was being developed for the combat firing practice of the crews of Tor air defense missile complexes. However, in the process of the system’s development, the engineers found broader application for the training simulator.
‘When we got the result, we realized that this system is useful not only for the Tor. It is necessary for all the systems, from shoulder-fired air defense weapons to short- and medium-range complexes and recently we practiced using it as a simulator for long-range systems in the close-in destruction area," the project’s director said.