Counter UAVs to drive enemy drones out of the sky

My Sky Technologies pitched its attack drone to the Australian Defense Force at Army Innovation Day 2017 in Canberra last week. It also recently responded to a Request for Proposals from the Australian Government’s Defense Innovation Hub with its surveillance drone. It hopes to hear the outcome of both projects in the coming weeks.

The company was spun out of parent company Simbiant in June and took part in Techstars’ defence and security-focused accelerator program in Adelaide from July to October. Simbiant, also based in the South Australian capital Adelaide, includes domain experts in hardware and software engineering, mathematics, physics, electronic warfare (EW) and complex military systems and platforms.

“The idea was conceived at Simbiant and it still has a lot of reach back but it is a different company because rather than being a research and development company it’s a product development company,” Auch-Schwelk said.

“The drone industry has really boomed – they have revolutionised the battlefield – but counter UAV hasn’t kept pace so there is a big hole in the market.

“Also, the smaller sensor manufacturers haven’t kept pace. A lot of the big military manufacturers like building big expensive things they can sell to the military. Their big sensor suites are worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars whereas we’ve seen a niche for cheap and small sensor suites at a fraction of the price suitable for more or less a disposable munition.”

Auch-Schwelk said combining off-the-shelf sensing technologies and shrinking them down onto their own boards would allow the drones to be compact, lightweight and affordable.

He said creating a drone weapon to attack another drone was a novel approach.

“There are many different governments trying to crack this nut but I don’t think anyone is really taking the path we are going down and that’s why it’s quite exciting.

“The big picture is that in three or four years there are going to be drones flying all over the place delivering packages and pizzas and all sorts of things and they are going to need situational awareness in the same way as driverless cars need to know everything that’s happening on the road.

“We want to get the cost of this sensor suite down and into a turnkey system that we can start selling to the hundreds of millions of drones being manufactured around the world to give that situational awareness of the air space around them.”

This story is published courtesy of The Lead