Page 44 - Australian Defence Magazine Feb-Mar 21

44 BORDER PROTECTION UNMANNED
FEBRUARY – MARCH 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
ABOVE: Australia and its neighbours cooperate at many levels on border protection issues.
helicopter with a dipping sonar bouncing the same energy off the contact. The contact wouldn’t even know this would also be heard by the Wave Gliders.”
Trials involving in-water demonstrations are scheduled for this year and for Burrowes the system offers obvious potential benefits to the ABF for surface ship detection and cueing.
“Border Force themselves point strongly towards finding synergy with Defence and this is exactly that,” he com- mented to ADM.
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Meanwhile Sydney-based Ocius continues development of its Bluebottle unmanned surface vessel (USV), powered by solar, wind and wave energy and designed to operate off- shore for extended periods with a payload of up to 300 kg.
Multiple sensors are available as options underwater, in- side the hull and on the aft communications mast. An in- tegrated and networked communication system allows live tracking. All vessels can be monitored while operating au- tonomously or controlled remotely, constantly transmitting data back to their control centre.
Sea trials last year saw the Bluebottle win Australian Maritime Safety Authority approval for autonomous opera- tions out to 200 nautical miles, the limit of Australia’s EEZ.
At the same time Ocius was awarded a two-year, $5.5 million contract by the Defence Innovation Hub to deploy five intelligent, networked Bluebottles to three different ar- eas of operation undertaking three different missions.
One such mission later this year will involve new-genera- tion 22 Bluebottles demonstrating off Darwin the potential capabilities of an intelligent network of persistent USVs fit- ted with Thales’ thin line sonar array, automatic identifi- cation systems, and Sentient Vision’s ViDAR optical radar.
The latter will enable Bluebottle to pick out aircraft, ships, and other objects of interest and inform a human
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