DRDO Asks Indian Industry to Build a 50-Drone, Jam-Proof Swarm Flown by One Operator

DRDO wants fifty drones to fly as one

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has asked Indian industry to crack one of the harder problems in modern aerial warfare: making fifty drones behave as a single, jam-proof machine. In a Request for Proposal (RFP) floated under its Technology Development Fund (TDF), the organisation has invited private companies — with an explicit welcome to micro, small and medium enterprises — to design and build a swarm that one person can command.

The structure is precise. The swarm must comprise at least forty-nine "slave" drones arranged in a seven-by-seven grid, marshalled by a single "master" drone that translates one operator's intent into the movements of the whole formation. The point is to let a lone soldier direct fifty aircraft as easily as one — a force-multiplier that collapses the manpower usually needed to fly a large fleet.

Formation flying, measured in centimetres

What sets this tender apart is the tolerance DRDO is demanding. The drones must fly in extremely close formation, holding a separation of no more than fifty centimetres from one another. Each aircraft must maintain its assigned position to within five centimetres across all three axes — not just left-to-right and forward-to-back, but up and down as well.

They must do this in winds of up to twenty metres per second — roughly seventy kilometres an hour — and at altitudes up to five thousand metres, where the air is thin and gusts are violent. When a drone is knocked off station, the system must detect and correct the error within five hundred milliseconds. Holding a fifty-strong lattice that tight, in weather that rough, at that altitude, is a control-systems challenge that few teams anywhere have solved.

Built to keep working under jamming

The second pillar of the RFP is electronic-warfare resilience. Modern air defences increasingly try to defeat drones not by shooting them down but by jamming the radio links that control them or spoofing the satellite signals they navigate by. DRDO wants a swarm that shrugs this off.

The specification calls for a jammer-proof communications link with a range of at least five kilometres, operating in the S-band, High Frequency band or C-band, and equipped with Electronic Counter-Countermeasure (ECCM) features designed to punch through hostile interference. The swarm is expected to hold formation and stay under control even when an adversary is actively trying to sever its links — the difference between a weapon that works in combat and a demonstration that only works on a calm test range.

Indigenous by mandate

The tender is also a statement about self-reliance. DRDO has stipulated that the system carry more than seventy per cent indigenous content, and it has explicitly barred commercial off-the-shelf components sourced from adversary countries — a pointed clause given how much of the world's civilian drone supply chain runs through China.

To draw industry in, DRDO is offering generous terms: the organisation will bear ninety per cent of the development cost, leaving the selected company to fund only a small share. In return, the winner will have twelve months to deliver a working prototype — an aggressive timeline for hardware this complex, and a sign that the establishment wants the capability in hand quickly rather than perfected slowly.

Why it matters

Drone swarms have moved rapidly from concept to battlefield reality, and militaries around the world now treat coordinated, autonomous formations as a defining feature of next-generation warfare. A swarm that can saturate an area, share sensing across dozens of aircraft and keep operating through jamming is far harder to defeat than any single drone.

By routing the work through the Technology Development Fund and courting MSMEs, DRDO is betting that India's private sector — not just its state laboratories — can deliver the underlying technology. The approach mirrors a wider push to build sovereign defence capability on the back of the country's engineering base, and to make sure the drones India flies in a future conflict are designed and built at home. For now the swarm exists only as a set of exacting numbers in a tender document; whether Indian industry can turn those numbers into fifty aircraft flying as one is the question the RFP is meant to answer.

Sources

• India's next generation of swarm drones: Why DRDO wants 50 drones to fly as one — The Week
• DRDO calls MSMEs to build swarm drones — Organiser
• Why DRDO Is Seeking Private Industry To Build Jam-Proof Swarm Drone Program With 50 Drones — Indian Defence News