UK organisations selected in first AUKUS Innovation Challenge
Image courtesy DASA
Through AUKUS Pillar 2, Australia, the UK and the US are pooling the talents of their defence sectors to develop at pace the delivery of advanced capabilities. Four UK companies have been selected by the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) to receive a share of the funding to develop solutions in electromagnetic targeting and protection.
The competition was run to find low cost, disposable, high volume and highly autonomous electromagnetic technology that can detect enemy actions or protect against them.
The four successful UK organisations to receive research funding are:
- Amiosec Ltd
- Autonomous Devices Ltd
- Roke Manor Research Ltd
- University of Liverpool
The trilateral AUKUS EW Challenge was run as three individual competitions by DASA in the UK, the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA), in Australia and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in the US. The EW competition was the first in what will be a series of AUKUS Innovation Challenges, setting the template for future advanced defence technology competitions run by the three partners.
National winners of the three EW Challenge competitions were announced at the AUKUS Defence Ministers’ Meeting on 26th September in London by UK Secretary of State for Defence, the Right Honourable John Healey MP; Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, the Honourable Richard Marles MP; and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III. The three Defence Ministers together emphasised the value of the collaboration to a free and open Indo-Pacific, with the potential to enhance joint defence capabilities, ensuring national, regional and global stability.
The three innovation competitions called for proposals to identify electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) technology solutions to help give the AUKUS nations a strategic edge in targeting and to provide protection against adversarial electromagnetic-targeting capabilities. EMS is a heavily congested, contested, complex and competitive environment and there is an increasing need for low cost, disposable, high volume and highly autonomous capabilities to achieve advantage.
In total, across all three national innovation challenges, 173 qualified suppliers applied, in a show of strength of the AUKUS nations’ defence innovation capabilities.
The winning UK supplier organisations:
- Amiosec Ltd: This project is seeking to create fake radio activity, masking the true location of friendly military forces to support missions. The research will focus on extending previous work on AI-generated traffic to boost realism to defeat adversary EW systems. It will be delivered by Amiosec in conjunction with its Australian defence technology partner, Penten.
- Autonomous Devices Ltd: Is developing and flight-demonstrating the novel combination of an EW payload and a small Uncrewed Air System platform.
- Roke Manor Research Ltd: The ability to transmit and receive on identical frequencies simultaneously has been an operational and technical challenge for decades. The Smart STAR Jammer project sets out to combine a Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) Transceiver jointly developed by Roke and the University of Bristol.
- University of Liverpool: This project aims to improve the ability to detect multiple individual faint signals in close geometric proximity to one another. This will be achieved using a combination of machine learning and statistics.
AUKUS is a landmark security and defence partnership to support a free and open Indo-Pacific by strengthening regional global security. A major part of the partnership, named Pillar 1, is helping Australia to acquire its first conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine fleet.
Through AUKUS Pillar 2 which includes advanced capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence, autonomy, quantum technologies and electronic warfare – the three national partners seek to strengthen trilateral capabilities in cutting-edge military technologies, increase interoperability and drive knowledge-sharing and innovation. One of the aims of Pillar 2 is to “foster deeper integration of security and defence-related science, technology, industrial bases and supply chains”.
