The new AI-based TAIWS weapon system will quickly align, detect, track and can shoot -- all within 10 milliseconds. The decision to shoot, however, will be with the soldier who will be sitting in a bunker and not with the AI
New Delhi: At a time when Pakistan is sending terrorists to the Jammu region, the Indian Army has developed an AI-based “track and shoot” weapon system, to be deployed at the Line of Control (LoC).
The system, called TAIWS, has an array of primary and secondary cameras to scan the thick vegetation at the Line of Control, and carries a medium machine-gun to neutralise any terrorist it caught trying to infiltrate.
The system, TAIWS, was developed mainly for deployment at the LoC after a need was felt for such a system to take on terrorists trying to infiltrate as part of surveillance and counter-terrorism measures.
Col. Ashish Dogra, who led the team which developed the weapon system, said that during trials it was found that the first round hit probability is 100 per cent. He said that the platform TAIWS is divided into two parts -- primary platform and secondary platform. "So, the primary platform is with a weapon system which is a medium machine-gun with a range of 1.8 km and with a primary sighting system, which has a day camera with 40x optical zoom and a thermal image camera which sees in the night with a range of around 2 km,” he said.
The primary sighting system is AI-enabled, which is constantly performing surveillance of the whole area and it is able to track and pick up any movement.
However, where TAIWS is different from similar weapons deployed by other countries like Israel is that it also has a network of secondary cameras to detect movement.
“What happens when something is not visible from the primary camera. That is the problem which nobody in the world thought about. So, what we did was we made a network of secondary cameras. We place them at intervals of 500 meters, 1 km, 2 km, depending upon the terrain requirement. If we are not getting the line of sight from one direction, we will get this line of sight from any other direction,” said Col. Dogra. “So, a terrorist can hide from one direction but he cannot hide from every direction because he has to move.”
“If any of the secondary cameras picks up the movement, that camera will quickly give direction to the weapon where to point. 10 millisecond is the reaction time which our weapon has,” he said.
“And very intentionally we have used a medium machine-gun (MMG). MMG fires in a big area like at 2 km, it makes a kill box of around 50 meters by 50 meters. Even if a terrorist tries to run, he will still get hit. One more feature which we have put in this is it is firing at the future position. If a terrorist is going in some direction, we are predicting the time taken by a bullet to travel, and other parameters. So, we are firing at the future position. A lot of work has been done on this,” he added.
“From the beginning we have developed it for the Line of Control. Whenever any terrorist is crossing the Line of Control, he uses the areas which are full of vegetation, trees and bushes, so that his movement is not tracked,” said Col. Dogra.
