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A Sydney-based business that manufactures products to detect and jam enemy drones has announced it’s signed a $600,000 deal with an undisclosed Five Eyes nation.
DroneShield will provide the country with a variant of its autonomous DroneSentry system, initially as a trial that could lead to a larger order.
Oleg Vornik, the business’ chief executive, said, “[There] is a significant potential for large follow-up systems to this customer, both this system configuration and cross-selling of our other products.”
The Five Eyes group of countries share intelligence information, and its members include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US.
Vornik said the deal validates the company’s AI-enabled signals intelligence (SIGINT) DroneSentry platform, which utilises AI across multi-spectrum, including radiofrequency and computer vision to deliver threat awareness and dominance.
The technology is designed to support the processing of large volumes of data from multiple domains.
“Importantly, the computer vision element also incorporates machine learning models in the long-wave infrared spectrum (LWIR) – this is in addition to more conventional electro-optical and night-vision sensors,” Vornik said.
According to the CEO, DroneShield has accumulated a substantial number of complex datasets across various domains throughout the development period, helping to optimise algorithms, proprietary techniques for smart marking of the data and techniques to maximise the efficiency of available data, including via creation of synthetic datasets.
“This, together with enriching our Defence customers’ own proprietary data and analytics via DroneShield’s modern, robust APIs, enables DroneShield to continue its lead in the artificial intelligence protocol development,” Vornik said.
The DroneSentry system’s hardware is expected to reduce the time lag and dependency on central systems, while its proprietary field programmable gate array (FPGA) techniques are tipped to reduce size and deliver superior efficiency to conventional computing chips.
In September, Australian Aviation reported how DroneShield announced a landmark new deal with the US Department of Defense.
“This contract is a material milestone in cementing our close working relationship with the largest defence customer globally,” said Vornik.
“In addition to expected purchases associated with this paid development contract, further orders for other DroneShield solutions are expected as part of developing a trusted supplier relationship with this customer.”
The product they’re investing in, DroneShieldComplete, displays a map showing the position of drones on the sky by analysing environmental data.
It can alert users as to the drone’s likely threat and also create “disruption and exclusion zones” to protect certain areas.
Additional reported by Defence Connect
