84 Defensive measures Naturally, security is a broad subject when it comes to uncrewed systems, but one that defence procurement groups take great interest in. The NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) is looking to deploy over €1 bn in funding for innovations across nine technical streams that stand to advance the defence, security and resilience of NATO allied nations. Those streams are classified as autonomy, AI, quantum computing, energy, novel materials and manufacturing, next-gen comms, hypersonic systems, biotechnology and space. NATO founded the NIF as part of its NATO 2030 initiative, intended to boost the impact of startups for nations and businesses across the transatlantic alliance. The organisation has backers in 24 NATO countries, and partners with a portfolio of supporting companies, including military UGV developer ARX Robotics, semiconductor company Space Forge, quantum sensor company Aquark Technologies and composites manufacturer iCOMAT. As well as bringing ideas like those above, applicants should be either startups or funds, and preferably those after seed-funding through to Series B funding. Geographically, applications must be headquartered in one of the group’s 24 partner nations, all currently located in Europe. NATO, meanwhile, more directly supports tech startups through its accelerator, DIANA (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic), which, as of writing, encompasses 23 accelerator sites and 182 test centres in Europe and North America. Funding and technical mentoring and expertise are among the tools that DIANA provides to 44 companies (as of 2024). These include: REVOBEAM in Poland, which develops cost-effective intelligent antennas that are ideal for uncrewed vehicles operating in harsh environments; GIM Robotics in Finland, which makes a variety of solutions for autonomous perception and navigation (indoors and outdoors); UUV component companies such as Elwave, dotOcean and Water Linked, which our readers may already know; and US-based UAV manufacturer Zepher Flight Labs (featured in Issue 36). While DIANA supports any country in a NATO allied nation, other country-specific platforms exist for more targeted funding of innovations. In the UK, the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) in December 2024 concluded the submissions round for a competition titled ‘Innovation in Support of Operations’, which offers £2 m of funding (excluding VAT) and encompasses four challenges for applicants to tackle. One challenge asks applicants to come up with ways to make legacy ground vehicles operate with basic levels of autonomy, preferably including the capacity to function in GNSSdegraded and -denied environments, as well as comms-denied or degraded environments. Also within the terms of that challenge was DASA’s interest in new navigation solutions for UAVs, particularly ones that could operate in GNSS-denied and -degraded spaces. Facilitating the capacity for UAVs to track their position to a minimum accuracy of 50 m (and 5 m objective accuracy) without any manual input is a key requirement. Additional preferences within the technical specs for proposed navigation solutions included a maximum weight of 1 kg and the ability to interface with industry-standard architecture (with the Cube Orange given as an example). Proposed systems are set to be judged against the costs and capabilities of presently available solutions, and tested over land, or a combination of land and water. While new UAV platforms are not inherently what DASA is after, applicants were requested to provide their own demonstration UAVs for the testing and evaluation phases, with aircraft weighing below 25 kg being ideal (the navigation solution is likely to be used on a future fixed-wing, 25 kg UAV with a 4 m wingspan). The other three challenges included low-cost and low-signature technologies for wide-area sensing and 3D counterbattery radar, including air search, solutions for minefield breaching, and ways for scaling-up complex manufacturing for military materiel and related components, including one-way UAVs and the electric motors used in their propulsion. Military logistics Logistics remains a perennial target market for autonomous systems in the military domain. To that end, funding tenders abound in many places for uncrewed logistics vehicles and solutions. In the EU, the European Defence Agency is offering €2.9 m across seven contracts, each lasting up to three years and revolving around autonomous systems for crossdomain logistics. The first three contracts specify proposals for UAVs. The first, smallest vehicle for proposals requires concepts for low-cost, attritable drones that can work collaboratively (the applicant contractor being required to provide at least three complete UASs, including external equipment) to support distributed, logistical supply CONOPS for mass delivery of small payloads under 10 kg. The second contract requires two complete UASs with VTOL capability, able to lift payloads of up to 50 kg each, but still reasonably transportable by ground December/January 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology DASA in the UK is seeking navigation systems for UAVs for GNSS-denied spaces, which can interface with industry-standard solutions such as the Cube Orange (Image courtesy of CubePilot)
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