As drone tactics evolve in conflicts like the US-Iran war, China said it has enhanced its radar systems with AI capabilities to better identify decoy drones and swarm activity.
Beijing’s new inverse synthetic aperture technology enables radars to quickly analyze targets from multiple angles, providing additional data that could help operators distinguish between real drones and decoy systems with similar flight profiles.
It also reportedly enhances the detection of low-altitude drones, including those operating close to terrain, sea surfaces, or within dense urban environments.
According to Xu Jin, a chief engineer at the 38th Research Institute of the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, the AI upgrade is being refined to track and calculate the trajectories of large drone swarms.
“Achieving accurate detection of a large number of drones requires a massive amount of processing power, posing a challenge to traditional radar detection,” Xu told the South China Morning Post.
“This technology is not yet mature, and the current detection effect enhanced by AI cannot be called perfect, but the improvement is still astonishing.”
Lessons From Current Events
The US-Iran war has highlighted the need for radar systems capable of detecting emerging drone tactics, such as swarm formations and decoy deployments.
Xu noted that when large numbers of drones are deployed simultaneously, it becomes more difficult for traditional radar systems to differentiate between individual platforms during coordinated attacks.
“Some of them may also have the ability to coordinate and divide tasks. This puts enormous processing pressure on traditional radar detection,” he added.
Xu described the AI upgrade as delivering “unexpected boosts” to the performance of existing radar systems.
The new tech forms part of the country’s push to accelerate the advancement of unmanned intelligent combat capabilities and related countermeasure technologies.
