In late 2025, China Aviation Industry Corporation’s “Jiu Tian” large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) successfully conducted its maiden flight, drawing global attention for its “drone swarm mothership” design. With a maximum takeoff weight of 16 tons and a payload capacity of 6 tons, this UAV can accommodate 200 to 300 micro-UAVs or loitering munitions in its ventral compartment, serving as an advanced airborne launch and command platform.
The emergence of “Jiu Tian” marks a fundamental transformation in warfare paradigms. The core of combat operations is shifting from single platforms to distributed, intelligent, and high-density swarm collaboration.
This transition also poses a new challenge for the application of UAVs in the chain of battlefield reconnaissance and situational awareness.
Key Challenges
Traditional single-UAV operation models rely on ground computing centers for 2D/3D modeling, target recognition, and position calculation. In field or complex scenarios, limited operational conditions or even communication disruptions can bring missions to a complete halt.
Meanwhile, the lack of autonomous mission allocation, data fusion, and route planning capabilities among multiple UAVs makes it difficult to form a real-time, unified, and interpretable battlefield panorama in an instant. The traditional workflow from target detection to the generation of coordinate information supporting fire guidance is overly lengthy, failing to meet the second-level response timeliness requirements under high-intensity confrontations.
Innovative Solution
Taking spatial intelligence as its core technology, Ice Cypress Technology leverages a technical framework of 3D spatial reconstruction and AI visual perception to provide highly intelligent core empowerment for UAV swarms performing forward missions.
The independently developed Mirauge3D fully automatic image 3D modeling system serves numerous clients, laying a solid foundation for underlying technologies such as air-to-ground calculation. The TrackSight high-speed moving target analysis system enables sub-pixel-level tracking and six-degree-of-freedom attitude calculation for targets such as missiles and aircraft, with key technical indicators outperforming internationally mainstream software.
Based on profound technical accumulation, Ice Cypress Technology has launched the Lingfeng Intelligent Shadow UAV Swarm System, which directly addresses the pain points of modern battlefield perception.
The Lingfeng UAV integrates 275 TOPS of AI computing power onboard, turning each UAV into a mobile intelligent node. During flight, it completes real-time 2D/3D reconstruction, target detection (such as vehicles and personnel), and sub-meter-level positioning, completely eliminating absolute dependence on rear computing power and stable communication links.
Equipped with military-grade communication modules, the system can operate continuously in communication-constrained scenarios such as overseas missions and mountain disaster sites, ensuring high reliability.
The Lingfeng Intelligent Shadow UAV Swarm System supports mixed formation of fixed-wing and multi-rotor UAVs. Multiple UAVs can independently perform data fusion and route optimization to form a distributed computing network. It can complete mission allocation and dynamic route planning for over 30 sorties within 1 minute, efficiently covering complex areas and dynamically responding to emerging targets.
Through onboard real-time processing, only less than 1% of the key structured data is transmitted back compared with traditional methods, greatly reducing the pressure on data links. The generation cycle of map data is shortened to the minute level, realizing in-flight synchronous modeling and real-time target positioning, and providing near-real-time situational support for command and decision-making.
The system can achieve second-level response from target detection to the generation of coordinate information supporting fire guidance, meeting the timeliness requirements under high-intensity confrontations.
Typical Scenarios
In military applications, each UAV in the Lingfeng Intelligent Shadow UAV Swarm System is equipped with a 2.5kg reconnaissance payload, with an endurance of 260 minutes. It supports all-weather intelligent patrol and high-precision reconnaissance, enabling multi-UAV collaborative 2D/3D modeling, sub-meter-level positioning of enemy targets, and real-time support for tactical decision-making.
With the advent of the drone swarm mothership era, the core competitiveness of the next-generation battlefield perception system has shifted to autonomy, collaboration, and real-time performance. In this process, the importance of core algorithm breakthroughs, integrated software and hardware capabilities, and validation in actual combat scenarios of the Lingfeng Intelligent Shadow UAV Swarm System has become increasingly prominent.
