Defence Calls for Army Innovation Proposals

The Department of Defence via the Defence Innovation Hub has issued a call out to Australian industry and academia for proposals to help Defence deliver the next generation of Australian Army capabilities.

The department is seeking proposals to develop concepts, organisation and technology offsets to meet current and future threats, and to enable Army to become a fully integrated component of the joint force, capable of fighting and winning through its employment of networks, systems and sensors across all domains.

In particular, Defence is seeking innovative solution with two key themes; Robotics and Autonomous systems (RAS) in the combat team, and disruptive effects in signature management.

For the first theme, the tender says “Armoured vehicles and dismounted combatants need to rapidly transfer and present information in a usable, cognitively manageable way to reduce risk of information overload particularly when prosecuting fleeting targets. Defence is also seeking innovative ideas to reduce human involvement in the combat team’s engagement and decision cycle using robotics and autonomous systems.”

For the second, it says, “Protecting individual soldiers, static and mobile platforms as well as combined arms teams is critical to the success of Defence operations. Defence is seeking innovative ideas to obfuscate signatures or create uncertainty in attempts to geo-locate.”