In a First, a Norwegian Project Integrates Drone Data to Correct Artillery Fire

During the recent “Steadfast Defender 24” NATO exercise, Norwegian and Swedish specialists conducted a unique experiment to correct artillery fire by obtaining information from multiple drone hovering over target territory.

The mission of the drone swarms is to discover the enemy's position and activities and relay the information to the artillery positions which are ready to fire. The information is relayed to a central drone command which uses software to determine the nature of threat and directs artillery fire to it.

For the first time, the drone swarms were controlled from a inside a Norwegian CV90 combat vehicle.

“The drones we use today have cameras with electro-optical and thermal sensors. This means that the camera is heat sensitive and can see in the dark,” says Lieutenant Colonel Mikkel Gorsetbakk.

Mikkel Gorsetbakk is project manager for ”Tomorrow's Combat Unit” and head of the Combat lab, one of the Norwegian Army Military Academy's technology development departments.

The Norwegian Defense Research Institute is working on developing new sensors and new drones that can perform various tasks. We want to be able to use a mixture of different drones in the swarm, controlled by the same system from the same operator cart, said Mikkel Gorsetbakk.

Not only UAVs, the drone swarm includes unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) too which will also transmit target data to the central drone command.

With digital transmission from the drone swarms or other sensors, the process of telling the artillery system operators where to shoot is a lot faster and more accurate than what is based on human intelligence.

The Tomorrow's Combat Unit project is to deliver operational capacity to the Norwegian Army within autonomous systems and artificial intelligence by 2028 at the latest.