Arjun Main Battle Tank (MBT) to get ‘Automatic Video Tracker’ from Bangalore firm

March 12, 2012 idrw.org SOURCE : BANGALORE MIRRIOR

In another bull’s eye for the city, a Bangalore-based electronics firm has developed a device which would soon make the Indian Army’s Arjun Main Battle Tank (MBT) an even more formidable weapon of war.

The indigenous Arjun tank, considered the finest third generation battle tank in the world, will soon be fitted with an ‘Automatic Video Tracker’, a device developed by Deepti Electronics and Electro-Optics Pvt Ltd (Delopt), Kanakapura Road. The device homes in on an enemy target and tracks it until it is destroyed.

Based on Line Replacement Units (LRUs) technique, a state-of-the-art technology, the tracker uses thermal technology to locate enemy tanks and vehicles. The device becomes the ‘eyes’ of the tank as it maintains a constant surveillance for potential targets. Once a target is detected, information is passed on to the gunner, who then launches a weapon to destroy the target. The entire process takes no more than a fraction of a second.

A prototype of the device was successfully tested on Arjun tanks in the Pokhran range, Rajasthan recently. A slightly modified version of the device will be handed over to the army in about a month’s time.

According to M R Sheshadri, director of Delopt, Arjun tanks are currentlyfitted with a manual thermal imager produced by a French company. It requires the navigator to constantly keep an eye on either the monitor or the view finder to locate enemy targets — a difficult process as both are on the move.

“By the time the information is passed on to the gunner, the target would have escaped,” Sheshadri, a former DRDO scientist, said. “With the thermal imager, the navigator can only track the enemy, but he cannot lock on to it for that perfect strike.”

Considering these drawbacks, the DRDO had called for tenders inviting firms to devise and manufacture a mechanism that would lock on to a target irrespective of its speed and location.

“Once the device locks on to a target, the commander can forget about it,” Sheshadri said. “The tracker will take care of the rest. It collects intelligence inputs like location, distance, range etc and in less than a few milliseconds output is sent to the gunner who then fires a missile to destroy the target. It has zero error. Unlike the earlier mechanism, with this device you can save personnel from fatigue. For instance, the tank commander can attend to some other duty while the tracker locks on to the target.”

An Arjun tank is operated by a four-member crew comprising a commander-cum-navigator, gunner, loader and driver.

While the tracker has been devised to primarily locate targets on land, it is capable of tracking air-borne threats as well.

“Whether the target is in the front or at the rear of the tank, the device can detect any enemy threat and lock on to it,” Sheshadri said. “During trials, it detected fighter aircraft and missiles at a distance of 25 to 30 kms away. But for terrestrial targets, the army wanted us to limit it to 3km. Israel has also installed a commercial grade version of the product in their surveillance gadgets like air balloons etc. The defence grade has been made available only to the  DRDO ,” he said.

Although it can locate a number of targets, the tracker can lock on to only one target at a time. “We are working to incorporate multiple target engaging facility,” said Sheshadri, whose firm took five years to develop the tracker.