Russia sees strong export potential for its satellite-based tool for the monitoring of drone flights among friendly countries, including among the BRICS bloc, JSC GLONASS general director Alexei Raikevich has announced.
“Russian communication and navigation technologies for civilian unmanned aircraft provide technological sovereignty and have high export potential to BRICS member countries,” Raikevich told Sputnik.
The company has tested components of a system designed to monitor beyond line of sight drone flights using its ERA-GLONASS satellite constellation, with tests carried out earlier this summer on Russia’s Sakhalin Island, and over Elbrus Mountain, Raikevich said.
The project, developed through the Russian National Technological Initiative and its ‘Digital Sky of Russia’ component, provides a unique hybrid communication system based on GLONASS’s technologies, and has “great potential” for use by friendly countries, with the mass use of civilian drones requiring transparency and an ability to access information in real-time, according to the company official.
“We are actively testing this hybrid communication network in the regions and in the interests of commercial companies for a variety of purposes, from cargo logistics and the monitoring of infrastructure facilities to the cultivation of agricultural lands,” Raikevich said.
The service could prove highly useful in Russia itself. While the country’s military drones have garnered significant attention over the two years amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the Russian government also has high hopes for the civilian drone market in light of Russia’s vast geography, which increases the need for unmanned systems capable of traversing vast spaces, engaging in environmental monitoring, providing disaster response and relief, and updating geospatial databases.
In 2023, the government approved a new civilian drone strategy up to the year 2030, citing the technology’s enormous potential. The strategy provides for measures to stimulate demand for Russian UAV technology, development and mass production, as well as infrastructure for servicing drones, from airports to specialized drone ports, assuring training for their use, etc.
During a visit to Russia’s Rudnevo industrial park outside Moscow last spring, President Putin said he expects about 1 trillion rubles (about $10 billion US) to be invested into drone technologies in the near future. Putin called on Russia to “digitize” the organization of air traffic to enable the safe and widespread use of unmanned aviation, and to work out preferential purchase and leasing mechanisms to expand demand for domestically-made drone tech.
Aeroscript Scientific Research Center deputy director Andrei Yablokov says Russia has made significant progress in drone development, and that the country has created good potential for exports.
Russia also has decades of experience as a global leader in satellite-based navigation systems, with the USSR developing the Tsikada series of low earth orbit navigation satellites in the 1970s, and beginning the launch of the GLONASS network in 1982. GLONASS was declared operational in 1993, and assembled into a full, 24 first-gen constellational in 1995, but was initially restricted for use by the military. The network degraded through the 1990s and early 2000s due to lack of funding, reaching just seven operational satellites by 2002.
A federal funding program promoted by the president sought to save, upgrade and modernize the network, with goals including improving GLONASS’s accuracy characteristics, improve its satellites’ lifespan (from three years in the original GLONASS satellites to seven in GLONASS-M and then ten with the GLONASS-K series) and allow for civilian use.
The network became available for civilian use in 2007, quickly resulting in the creation of GLONASS-based navigation equipment for vehicles, and prompting major global cellphone makers to start making their products compatible with GLONASS, which enjoys superior accuracy characteristics at northern latitudes.
GLONASS’s satellites are launched into orbit aboard Soyuz-2.1b and Proton-M carrier rockets.