News

https://defenceinnovationnetwork.com/seed-projects-awarded-in-december-2019/

The Defence Innovation Network (DIN) has awarded a Seed Project grant to Ocius and UNSW as part of the NSW Government’s initiative to support defence innovation.

Through the Defence Innovation Network, the NSW Government provides companies with matched funding to fast-track the development of early-stage technology concepts that can bring innovative solutions to Defence.

This project aims to detect and geolocate GNSS jammers and spoofers in an GNSS-denied environment at sea using low-cost unmanned sea vehicles (USV) that bear extremely low radar cross-section (RCS).

The project addresses the defence need to be situationally aware of its Electro-Magnetic (EM) environment, which falls under the Integrated intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance theme. This is especially true as more and more devices onboard mobile platforms (e.g. navy ship, aircraft and land vehicles) depend on GNSS for communications, position authentication and/or navigation.

The ability to navigate is critical to many applications, but even military encrypted GPS/GNSS signals are disabled by jamming. This is a highly integrated miniaturised system mounted on an USV being useful as part of reconnaissance of regions suspected of malicious activity. It will inform where GPS coverage is available or unavailable. This could then help inform decision-making and route planning to avoid an accurately determined GPS-denied region.

This project provides a straightforward path to develop anti-jamming technologies for Bluebottle USVs for its operation in GPS-denied environments and could be applicable to other applications including Unmanned Aerial vehicles.