Innovative Australian tech to deliver next-gen maritime domain awareness
2 March 2023
Melbourne-based Arkeus has officially launched its next-generation intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sensor system, combining the capabilities of uncrewed and crewed aircraft to revolutionise the situational awareness environment.
The Hyperspectral Optical Radar (HSOR), a real time autonomous wide-area hyperspectral sensor, will deliver data for critical decision making in both challenging or contested operating environment.
Developed by Melbourne-based developer ARKEUS, which said the world-leading sensor slashes current exploitation time for hyper-spectral imagery from days or hours to mere seconds.
Arkeus chief executive officer Simon Olsen said, “We understand that speed is critical, and no existing system comes close to this level of responsiveness; the HSOR offers significant capability enhancement for security, stability, and sovereignty objectives.”
The technology is developed under contract for the Australian Department of Defence, with sponsorship from the Australian Navy. The HSOR offers a new level of precision when it comes to information processing, with operators able to filter and define objectives specific to mission requirements rather than being flooded with excess data to manually manage — dramatically reducing the workload of the operators.
Olsen explained the importance this new capacity would have in supporting the Australian warfighter and broader national security objectives including maritime surveillance and border protection operations, saying, “There is no more searching through surplus information to eliminate threats or discern a contact from an anomaly; the HSOR processes data on the edge to deliver specific contact intelligence at optimum speed to facilitate immediate decision making.”
HSOR surveillance capabilities are also unprecedented — the technology is optimised for aircraft or drones conducting a wide variety of missions over land, sea or littoral environments including maritime domain awareness, ISR, border protection, city-size surveillance and reconnaissance, force protection, counter terrorism, illegal activity monitoring or search and rescue.
Olsen added, “The HSOR is the first system that can support both day and night operations in all conditions and all environments on both water and land, superseding all current situational awareness capabilities.
“Arkeus is proud to herald the next generation in payloads, small enough to fit within the size, weight, and power constraints of a tactical UAS. We are anticipating considerable interest not just within Australia, but from the US, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific,” he said.
Arkeus is a proudly Australian-owned and operated SME delivering transformative effects for search, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (S-ISR) accelerating decision making through the fusion of optics and autonomy.
Previously operating as IAS Asia Pacific, the Melbourne-based company was rebranded as Arkeus in February 2023. The company’s wide area autonomous optical search and surveillance systems are optimised for aircraft or drones conducting a range of missions including ISR, border protection, city size surveillance, force protection, counter terrorism, illegal activity monitoring or search and rescue.
Arkeus optical surveillance systems operate across land, sea, and space domains, delivering a truly multi-role, multi-spectrum capability — specialising in extracting critical intelligence and surveillance information and disseminating that data in challenging or contested environments.
Source: Defence Connect