Ocius Bluebottles to ‘protect Australia’s maritime borders’
Ocius Technology Bluebottle autonomous unmanned surface vessels. Image: supplied by Ocius Technology.
Ocius Technology, a Sydney based company that develops autonomous unmanned surface vessels, was awarded a $5.5 million contract as part of eight new defence contracts announced this week by Minister for Defence Industry, the Hon Melissa Price MP.
Funded under the Federal Government’s flagship $640 million defence innovation program, the eight new contracts are worth more than $21 million.
Minister Price said defence’s partnership with Ocius will continue the development of its innovative Bluebottle vessel, which can conduct advanced maritime surveillance and communicate data in real time.
“This technology could provide the Royal Australian Navy with a unique capability to protect Australia’s maritime borders,” Minister Price said.
The vessel, called Bluebottle, is powered by solar, wind and wave energy and can carry up to 300 kilos of sensors and equipment in the ocean.
These USVs can monitor a large area of the ocean continuously at a disruptively low cost without having anybody in harm's way, said Robert Dane, Founder and CEO at Ocius Technology.
“Under this 2-year contract, we will deploy 5 intelligent networked Bluebottles to 3 different Areas of Operations doing 3 different types of jobs,” said Mr Dane. “We look forward to working again with DIH, Navy and Thales Australia, as well as demonstrating Bluebottle’s persistent maritime surveillance capability to other agencies and industry partners across Australia.”
"For Australia, we have 11% of the world's oceans to look after and only 0.3% of the world’s population," said Mr Dane.
"Autonomous unmanned surface vessels that don't use any fuel, don't need a crew and are cheap to operate are perfect for these [tasks]."
"What makes Bluebottles unique is that they have vastly more power, payload capacity and better performance than any of our competitors in this persistent maritime surveillance market."
With applications across oil and gas, defence, and science, the vessels have been designed to endure strong ocean currents specific to Australian conditions.
The vessels currently carry a wide range of sensors that monitor environmental conditions such as air pressure, air temperature, wind strength, water temperature and depth.
The vessels are also equipped with cameras, sonar arrays, Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) and Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) that survey the environment for submarines, ships and aeroplanes.
The NSW Smart Sensing Network (NSSN) member university researchers have the opportunity to collaborate with the team at Ocius Technology to deploy new sensors on the vessels for testing.
Mr Dane said OCIUS is interested to look at new sensing technologies for example that could identify different species or numbers of fish around the vessel or GPS microchips onboard that can accurately measure height above sea level to facilitate tsunami detection and warning.
Another area that NSSN member university researchers and engineers can contribute to is designing a flexible and user-friendly on-board data processing system.
The vessels record a high volume of telemetry and sensor data onboard said Chief Engineer at Ocius Technology, Lloyd Breckenridge.
"We are developing software to analyse and summarize the data and therefore minimize the alerts that are reported to onshore operators," said Mr Breckenridge.
“We can then give the operators the ability to retrieve higher resolution data for a more comprehensive analysis.”
To learn more about collaboration opportunities with Ocius Technology please contact NSSN Research Theme Leader, Dr Ramanathan Vaidyanathan via email on ram.vaidyanathan@nssn.org.au.
To learn more about Ocuis Technology, please click here.
Media: Shahrzad Abbasi — 0466548145