By Staff Writer.
Thales Australia and Ocius Technologies signed a deal to develop and deploy a scalable unmanned surface vehicle equipped for anti-submarine warfare and surveillance missions at the Indo-Pacific 2022 event in Sydney on Tuesday.
The partnership will see Ocius’ Bluebottle USVs integrated with Thales Australia’s new thin line fibre optic towed array capability and deployed to autonomously patrol large areas of Australia’s coastline and perform extended underwater intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.
“This is part of an autonomous swarm capability for protecting Australia’s maritime approaches,” said Thales Australia CEO Chris Jenkins at the signing.
Ocius’ 22-foot Bottlebottle USVs look a lot like a small solar-powered yacht. But they pack a big capability punch. The USVs are self-sustaining marine platforms powered by wind, solar, and wave energy. The Bluebottle can stay out to sea for months, travel far, and needs no fuel, no supplies, and no crew except for one person controlling the vessel remotely.
Ocius says the Bluebottle USVs can serve as a powerful supplement to manned and unmanned aircraft, manned ships, and submarine operations by reducing cost and adding capability.
The Thales CEO says his organisation’s role is to provide sensor capability and support Ocius through integration issues while bringing Bluebottle’s capability to fruition. Chris Jenkins says the partnership has the potential to offer significant capability advantages and asymmetric capabilities to the Australian Defence Force.
Ocius, a Sydney-based SME, first teamed up with Thales to talk about the chances of deploying their arrays on Bluebottle back in 2013. Back then, Thales’ winch to deploy the array weighed 110 kilograms, and that was never going to fly on a 22-foot USV. Since then, they’ve worked on solving that problem.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” said Ocius founder and CEO Rob Dane. “We built the winch in the keel. We now have the ability to deploy the array. We can travel the boat around with the array in the boat, and we can deploy it anywhere. It’s an example of an SME and prime working together to make something happen.
“We have four of these Bluebottles right now deployed out of Broome, 180 miles off the coast, guarding some shoals and some reefs, and right now, it’s 25 knots, it’s three-knot currents, and we’re out there, and nobody else is.”
Troy Stephens, Vice President of Underwater Systems at Thales, says the beauty of working with Ocius is leveraging Thales’ submarine and frigate technologies, their sonar technologies, and deploying them into a small vessel like the Bluebottle.
“Bluebottle is important because it’s autonomous, it’s small, it’s persistent, and it’s very, very quiet. Combined with the world’s best sonar, and you have an incredible capability,” Mr Stephens said.
Thales says the signing of the partnership will take the Bluebottle USV forward, allowing both parties to focus on the USV’s future with the Royal Australian Navy and other navies, particularly regarding underwater surveillance.
“There’s a large ocean out there that needs to be monitored by the Australian Navy,” adds Troy Stephens. “This is the right formula to do that.”
