Image of the missile test, shared by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, July 25, 2025.
Credit: X/@rajnathsingh
New Delhi: India on Friday successfully fired an advanced precision guided missile from an UAV developed by a Bengaluru company, paving the way for the army to have future weapons to strike at enemy armoured vehicles.
The unmanned aerial vehicle launched precision guided missile is equipped with three warhead options to destroy modern armoured vehicles.
“The ULPGM-V3 is equipped with a high definition dual-channel seeker that can strike a wide variety of targets. It can be fired in plain and high-altitude areas,” the defence ministry said. It is an enhanced version of the ULPGM-V2 missile developed by DRDO earlier.
The missile was released from an indigenous UAV, developed by Newspace Research Technologies, a Bengaluru-based start-up.
The UAV-launched weapon has day-and-night capability and two-way data link to support post-launch target/aim-point update.
The missile is equipped with three modular warhead options to penetrate the armour. One option is to destroy modern age armoured vehicles equipped with rolled homogeneous armour with explosive reactive armour; penetration-cum-blast warhead with anti bunker application and pre-fragmentation warhead with a high lethality zone. The trials were carried out for the anti-armour configuration.
The missile is jointly developed by a consortium of DRDO laboratories - Research Centre Imarat, Defence Research and Development Laboratory, Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory, High-Energy Materials Research Laboratory, Integrated Test Range and Defence Electronics Research Laboratory.
DRDO is pursuing integration of ULPGM weapons with long-range and high endurance UAVs from many other Indian companies including Adani Defence and Bharat Dynamics Limited.
The flight trials were carried out at the National Open Area Range at Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh.