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Ocius Bluebottle uncrewed surface vessels will provide the Australian Defence Force with “flexible, persistent and capable long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance”, according to recent comments from Royal Australian Navy Head Navy Capability Rear Admiral Stephen Hughes.
RADM Hughes made the comments following the naming of Ocius Bluebottle USV BB715 at the Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition in Sydney last week.
The Ocius Bluebottles are expected to provide surface intelligence, surveillance and anti-submarine warfare capabilities to defence customers, as well as support for civilian maritime applications.
“This christening is the culmination of the first significant contract we had with Osius. To deliver us a flexible, persistent and capable (technology) to do long-range persistent ISR within that, but do it in a way that’s reliable,” RADM Hughes said.
“At the moment, I think Ocius are at over 165 days at sea with one product … So they’re achieving that, it’s reliable.
“Now with the partnership … there is continual evolution of the capability depending how the mission changes and what we need it to do. I can rely on these companies to go through that development, show that initiative and that innovation to get us the capability we need.
“(The Bluebottles will be) ISR mainly, because they’re not weaponised, they’re not big enough or capable of doing that. But for me, it’s how they provide that reliable, persistent capability that allows us to then take that data, infuse it, and then be more responsive to an ISR scenario rather than trying to do everything at once.
“They will be complementary (with surface and subsea vessels).”
Australian-owned company Ocius designs, builds, operates and sustains the world-class autonomous systems as the company’s flagship platform. The system relies on solar, wind and wave energy to allow persistent operations in a wide range of conditions.
Speaking at the event, Ocius founder and CEO Robert Dane confirmed that the company will be using artificial intelligence technology to efficiently gather information from the seagoing vessels.
“It’s disruptive (networked technology) in the sense that one Bluebottle can detect something that might have a 10 per cent probability of being a contact and another Bluebottle has the same 10 per cent. Then you fuse those two bits together, you get 100 per cent probability that is something that is really there,” Dane said.
“And so we’ve been doing this literally in the last few days of fusing together contacts and picking up things that the human just couldn’t pick up.
“We can’t look at 10 boats or 100 boats, and we can’t look at all six cameras at once, and radars because it’s a lot of blurs. So artificial intelligence can pick that stuff up much, much quicker … That’s how we should be doing the data that comes in from the assets.”
BB715 was named following the earlier launch of Defendable Technologies’ Auralis product. Auralis is a newly certified, internationally assessed, secure information-sharing solution ideally suited for enabling uncrewed platforms like the Ocius Bluebottle USV.
