The Ukrainian company TAF Industries has developed its own night interceptor drone based on the Kolibri UAV, designated the TAF-I10.
In an interview with Militarnyi, the company’s CEO, Volodymyr Zinovskyi, said that the new drone is currently undergoing testing and codification.
According to Zinovskyi, in recent months TAF Industries has been upgrading its standard digital FPV drone, the Kolibri-10, at the military’s request to convert it into an interceptor drone.
Specifically, the company installed different propellers and integrated a camera-mounted servo drive to improve target detection and tracking.
“But these were isolated cases made upon request. We realized that we wanted to turn it into a finished product, increase the speed, and so on,” the CEO said.
TAF-I10
The TAF-I10 interceptor has a confirmed top speed of 205 km/h, compared to 160 km/h for the Kolibri, and this is not the limit. The manufacturer plans to further increase this figure.
“It is a modified ‘Ten’ on the one hand, but if you go into details, it is almost an entirely new product, because it is equipped with new propellers, a different motor, a different stack, and a different battery. In fact, only the frame and the same camera remain,” Zinovskyi said.
He also noted that TAF Industries has found a solution that enables the TAF-I10 interceptor drone with a digital camera to operate at night.
According to him, this solution is comparable in price to a standard analog thermal camera.
When asked how much the interceptor version of the drone would differ in price from the base Kolibri model, the company’s CEO replied:
“It will not be significantly more expensive. We are currently contracting volumes and want to lock them in, and based on that we will determine the final price. But in any case, it will not be significantly more expensive than the standard version.”
