Vijay Mohan
Chandigarh, January 4
The Indian Army, which has its elements deployed in multifarious and often difficult terrain, is developing satellite-based systems to track and monitor troop movements and facilities in remote areas.
Thousands of troops and scores of army convoys move each day for operational, logistic and administrative purposes across the length and breadth of the country, while many military facilities are located in areas where communication is a challenge. The systems, with embedded artificial intelligence, will assist in effective monitoring and quick decision-making during contingencies.
The project to develop the systems has been placed in the 8th edition of the Defence India Start-up Challenge (DISC) that was issued in December 2022. DISC is an initiative of the Ministry of Defence for supporting start-ups MSMEs and innovators to create prototypes and commercialise products and solutions in the area of national defence and security.
“The armed forces operate in rugged and inhospitable terrain where the tracking of deployed troops or assets becomes challenging due to the topological conditions. In view, a pervasive network footprint offered by satellite communication could prove beneficial for such geo-tracking applications,” the DISC document reads.
The system for tracking troops would have two elements – a ‘user’ element in the form of a small terminal that can be carried by mobile teams or vehicles to transmit its positional information to a centralised server using the satellite link, and a ‘logging’ element comprising a server along with the requisite digital capability for displaying and archiving the positional information transmitted by various user terminals.
A secure geo-satellite supported IoT platform for real-time monitoring of remote facilities and assets from dedicated control centres operated by the Army is the other system under consideration.
“Facility monitoring assumes critical importance in both civil and military parlance. Many installations store a variety of equipment and stores, each requiring specialised storage and environmental conditions. Any deviation of these environmental specifications could be detrimental or hazardous,” the document reads
“This becomes challenging when the storage facilities are located at remote locations. Hence a remote monitoring and control solution, based on Internet of Things (IoT) would be ideally fulfilling the requirement,” the documents adds.
The army is looking at developing an IoT-based sensor-control loop working through satellite link that is able to offer machine-to-machine (M2M) communication for relaying the sensor data to a central location for archiving and analytics. The system should be able to achieve automatic control action without human intervention in a near real-time manner.