The "Great Wall-2024" International Forum on Counter-terrorism kicks off on August 27, 2024. Courtesy: Chinese People's Armed Police Force

China has demonstrated advanced unmanned technology for counter-terrorism at an international forum, including intelligent drone swarms and bird-like ornithopters. These technologies help users rapidly and precisely locate and target terrorists, even in complex terrains.

The Great Wall-2024 International Forum on Counter-terrorism kicked off in Beijing on Tuesday. Hosted by China's armed police force, the four-day event has brought together over 170 delegates from more than 50 similar foreign armed forces, as well as over 150 Chinese representatives.

As suggested by its theme "Unmanned Counter-terrorism Operations," the international forum focuses on three topics, namely unmanned counter-terrorism equipment, unmanned counter-terrorism combat tactics and unmanned counter-terrorism training and talent cultivation.

To enhance the effectiveness of counter-terrorism operations, it is necessary to utilize unmanned and artificial intelligence technologies to upgrade weapons and equipment for battlefield perception, search and tracking, guidance and precision strikes, Sun Xueyu, assistant Chief of Staff of the People's Armed Police Force (PAPF), said at the forum on Tuesday. 

With the development of artificial intelligence, the current trend for drones has transited from individual drones to intelligent swarms, Senior Colonel Gao Yawei from Zhejiang Corps of PAPF said at the forum on Tuesday. 

For example, China's Zhejiang University developed an intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle capable of autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance in 2022. The flight time of the vehicle has reached 12 to 14 minutes, at speed of 10 to 15 meters per second. The current test fleet consists of 16 drones, with a maximum of 200 drones. 

The vehicle can autonomously navigate and avoid obstacles, and navigate through complex environments such as forests, urban areas and other challenging terrains, Gao said.  

Gao said that drone swarms have the advantage of entering narrow spaces, conducting synchronized reconnaissance on different regions and multiple targets and can achieve rapid discovery and real-time positioning functions. 

Intelligent drone swarms have autonomous flight capability in a non-signal source environment, Gao said, noting that they can effectively overcome spectrum detection and electromagnetic interference, and therefore can be widely used in the field of counter-terrorism operations.

When facing enemies head-on, intelligent drone swarms serve as the vanguard to enter the battlefield before combatants. Gao said this uses drone swarms' efficient detection and real-time strike capabilities to exchange relatively small costs for greater results in fighting with terrorists.

The current drone swarms, however, still face shortages such as short battery life, unstable communication, difficult recognition and light payload capacity.

In order to further enhance drone swarms' ability in fighting terrorism, Gao said it is necessary to break the technology's bottlenecks in long-range endurance, intelligent recognition, wireless communication and strike capabilities, to help create an intelligent swarm of drones with capabilities suitable for future counter-terrorism battlefields.

During the forum, Senior Colonel Chen Changlong explored the use of ornithopters, an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings, in counter-terrorism. 

Ornithopters have characteristics such as high concealment, high mobility, high efficiency and high adaptability, and they are becoming more popular for future unmanned counter-terrorism operations, Chen said. 

Modern fixed-wing aircraft and rotorcraft seek stealth by focusing on electromagnetic waves, noises and visibility, but ornithopters achieve stealth in terms of recognition, an anonymous expert told the Global Times in a previous interview, "Even if you see the aircraft, you will tend to ignore it because you might think it is a bird."

The single flying duration of a type of ornithopter prototype "Yun Xiao" developed by Northwestern Polytechnical University has reached 123 minutes, a major breakthrough, the university said in a post on its WeChat account in 2022.

In order to widen ornithopters' application in real combat situations, Chen suggested it is important to strengthen on key technologies, such as motor drive system flight self-control, and starting to build a human-ornithopter integrated defense team, making the use of ornithopters more frequent and common in the combat teams.