Australian Army to equip Integrator UAS with domestically developed optical radar

An Insitu Pacific Integrator UAS equipped with Arkeusʼ Hyperspectral Optical Radar (HSOR). (Arkeus)

The Australian Army is procuring an optical radar from Melbourne-based sensor developer Arkeus to enhance the surveillance capabilities of its Integrator unmanned aircraft system (UAS).

Arkeus' Hyperspectral Optical Radar (HSOR) is being procured under the Australian Army's Wide Area Airborne Surveillance (WAAS) initiative, which aims to enhance the Integrator UAS' wide-area intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) coverage.

A spokesperson for Arkeus told Janes on 12 November that HSOR is a “wide area, real-time, hyperspectral sensor” that can autonomously detect, track, and identify targets across complex operational environments.

The spokesperson said HSOR has been evaluated under different environmental conditions in the United States and Australia, demonstrating detection ranges beyond that of existing comparable optical and radar-based systems. By way of example, the spokesperson added that during operational evaluations in degraded visual environments in the US, HSOR demonstrated 8x the range compared with existing optical sensors.

HSOR is integrated with Arkeus' ARK artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration and data fusion engine, the spokesperson said. “ARK uses a multimodal sensing approach to create a hyperspectral cube of data from within which the AI is able to form a contextualised understanding of its environment in real time,” the spokesperson added.

“The exploitation engine within ARK is capable of observing the world across large parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, enabling a complex and dynamic understanding of the environment and contacts [targets] within it.

“Rather than employing traditional automation tools to recognise familiar images, as is the case with most machine learning models, [ARK] can spectrally fingerprint contacts across the environment of operation – delivering high levels of confidence even through attempts to deceive or disrupt.