ne of Türkiye’s leading defense industry companies, HAVELSAN, has successfully demonstrated its “Digital Unit Concept” by deploying a swarm of autonomous rotary-wing kamikaze drones in a live field activity. Conducted under the observation of senior civilian and military officials, the demonstration highlighted next-generation warfare capabilities based on swarm intelligence and distributed control architectures.

During the activity, a swarm composed of POYRAZ rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles took off and executed multiple aerial formations before transitioning into attack scenarios. The drones carried out coordinated dives toward designated targets, completing their kamikaze missions autonomously. Notably, the swarm operated without the need for a centralized decision-maker, relying instead on distributed architecture principles that enabled independent yet synchronized task execution.

Even under conditions involving communication link losses and partial network disruptions, the system maintained uninterrupted mission performance. Individual swarm elements used local perception, situational awareness, and decision-making mechanisms to ensure mission continuity. The demonstration also validated dynamic swarm management capabilities, including real-time adaptation through autonomous inclusion or exclusion of swarm members, ensuring scalability, flexibility, and mission-oriented resilience.

Scenarios further showed that drones exhibiting abnormal behavior or system faults autonomously separated from the swarm without compromising overall mission integrity. Collision avoidance algorithms, consensus-based movement, and formation control ensured stable, coordinated, and collision-free flight. The swarm also demonstrated the ability to split into multiple sub-swarms, each engaging separate targets independently yet in coordination with higher-level mission objectives.

Additionally, HAVELSAN’s vertical take-off and landing fixed-wing autonomous UAV BULUT provided real-time imagery using the AGGÖZ GIMBAL 275 electro-optical system developed by ASISGUARD. HAVELSAN CEO Mehmet Akif Nacar emphasized that this fully indigenous, distributed swarm intelligence represents a game-changing capability for future battlefields, extending beyond tactical UAV use to comprehensive airspace coordination and management.