Following the unmanned ground vehicle BARKAN’s entrance into the inventory of Turkish Armed Forces as the first member of HAVELSAN’s Digital Troops technology, second member of the family the sub-cloud Unmanned Aerial Vehicle BAHA was exported to Africa for the first time. HAVELSAN has been attending at the significant defense exhibitions organised abroad to introduce its brand new high-tech products to international audience. Mostly at these fairs, HAVELSAN had serious talks with the authorities of potential countries including especially the ones in the Africa region. Backed by this strong cooperation intention, those countries were invited to Türkiye on purpose just before IDEF’23, to carry out certain test activities upon their preferences. In this context, the export agreement followed those interactions and the vehicles are planned to be sent to the export destinations very soon. For one year, tests and development activities regarding the first version of BAHA have been carried out in line with the necessities and requirements of the field and the customers, respectively.
Accordingly, with respect to the evolving expectations of the end users together with our business ecosystem, HAVELSAN has upgraded some specifications of the platform such as volume and weight like issues on one hand, and concentrated further on its core mission as making those platforms smarter, on the other. In short, issues that came along with the needs of the customers were solved in accordance, while providing extraordinary service in the field. BAHA has taken its final form as of today and has reached the level of a smart product. With the latest version of BAHA, HAVELSAN is practicing flight-testing activities in various regions of Türkiye in order to prove its durability in different climates and conditions. HAVELSAN is collecting data especially in the electronic warfare environment, and reflecting them all into its software development activities. Features such as GPS independent movement and capability to return to home base and complete the required mission even when communication is completely lost, have already been acquired by the platform, tested in the field at various regions and reached the point to be verified with the end user at certain regions.
Successful field practices regarding the joint operations of BAHA and BARKAN (HAVELSAN’s Autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle) within the scope of “Digital Troops” has revealed the company’s short term plans in this technology more. As a critical step in this manner, the company is about to accomplish its target about strengthening the joint operational capabilities of its Digital Troops through the advent of Autonomous Heavy Class UGV -KAPGAN and POYRAZ Drone as the new members recently added to this family. Moreover, the company is dedicated to integrate the unmanned products of other companies into its Digital troops system in order to offer a wide portfolio of products that can meet the demands of the Forces and fulfil the mission concepts in the field. In this endeavour, HAVELSAN has already received such positive feedbacks from its business partners and potential/current customers that the products of other companies will also be tested by HAVELSAN in the field in the near future. The first concrete example of this approach is the case of Asisguard’s SONGAR which is examined for the communication between its own products to undertake joint operations and compose mission concept.
HAVELSAN is a Turkish software and systems company having business presence in the defence and IT sectors. It is headquartered in Ankara, Turkey, with subsidiary companies and offices around Turkey and abroad. Havelsan is mostly active in the fields of C4ISR, naval combat systems, e-government applications, reconnaissance surveillance and intelligence systems, management information systems, simulation and training systems, logistics support, homeland security systems and energy management systems. Havelsan was established by the Turkish Air Force (TUAF) Foundation in 1982 as a Turkish company named Havelsan-Aydin in order to provide maintenance for the Turkish Air Force’s high technology radars. In 1985, Havelsan was separated from the foreign shareholders and incorporated as a national company with a share of 98% owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation.Although Havelsan has generally been involved in military software projects, it has also taken responsibilities on e-government projects and successfully implemented them. Havelsan is one of the subcontractors of the Peace Eagle Project. Havelsan is mainly responsible for delivering the ground support segment which consists of crew training, mission planning and software maintenance functions. Havelsan worked on becoming a main subcontractor of Boeing for Italian and Korean AEW&C projects but Boeing withdrew from this sub-contractorship in early 2009
