The third in DST Group’s annual Partnerships Week events was held in Adelaide in August, attracting record numbers of delegates from across industry, academia and Defence.
The event has alternated between DST Group’s facilities at Edinburgh in South Australia and Fishermans Bend in Melbourne since its inception in 2015 and this year Partnerships Week coincided with National Science Week.
In his opening address, Chief Defence Scientist Dr Alex Zelinsky said that the organisation had been overwhelmed with applications this year and its popularity was underlined on the first day of the event by the queues of traffic waiting to get in to the car park.
Dr Zelinsky said that partnerships formed with academia, industry and privately funded research agencies reaffirm DST Group’s commitment to teamwork and collaboration.
“Over the past two years this flagship event has highlighted the importance of continuing to strengthen our external engagement while opening opportunities for collaboration to achieve capability outcomes for Australia’s defence and national security,” he said.
“This year we have a more direct involvement in the program by our partners in industry, academia and Defence, and our STEM education shareholders.”
Dr Zelinsky said that the previous two events were focussed on showcasing the organisations capabilities, but this year the focus is on understanding what industry and academia are capable of, with the program evolving into a more interactive event.
“The first part was to remind people of what our capabilities are, as the national science agency working in the national defence and security space,” he told delegates. “I think we’ve done that, so the next part moves from ‘transmit’ mode to ‘receive’ mode, which is understanding what our potential partners out there in industry and academia can do, and then to broaden our interaction with them.”
Small Business Innovation Research for Defence
Dr Zelinsky also used the opportunity to provide some details of the Small Business Innovation Research for Defence (SBIRD) program, designed to provide support to SMEs working on research projects aligned with defence priorities through the Next Generation Technologies Fund.
He said that, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 90 per cent of Australia’s economy is driven by the SME sector and noted that there are a large number of innovative companies working in the space.
“The Small Business Innovation Research for Defence program is one of the main focuses of our work and will feature predominantly in this Partnerships Week. We are inviting small businesses to pitch their capabilities to Defence, because we want to know what small businesses are capable of doing and, I think, understanding each others’ mutual strengths and diversity of experience and expertise that can bring this together,” he said.
“It is a two stage program: Stage One will focus on the feasibility of the technology, funding small business to do research and to look at early stages of a technology to see if it has feasibility, and they can receive funding up to $100,000 over a period of up to nine months. If the technology passes the first stage, Stage Two will look at testing in a laboratory setting against Defence applications, with funding up to $750,000 up to 24 months.”
The SBIRD program is based on a successful US program developed during the Reagan administration and DST Group ran a workshop during Partnerships Week, aimed at shaping the Australian initiative. Dr Zelinsky said that he expects a formal call for applicants in the October-November timeframe.
Co-operative agreements
DST Group signed three additional co-operative agreements during the event, with Chemring Australia, Sonartech Atlas and DefendTex, to develop a range of technologies to enhance Defence capability.
A five-year research agreement with Chemring Australia will explore technologies to improve aircraft countermeasures systems through the development of an advanced flare capability and will examine the use of technologies such as resonant acoustic mixing.
Sonartech Atlas will pursue innovative technologies in the maritime domain, via a three-year research partnership with DST Group. The agreement will focus on short-term signal analysis, onboard signature management systems and multi-sensor detection, tracking and data fusion and will accelerate the transfer and commercialisation of the technologies.
A 30-month agreement signed with DefendTex will involve a staff exchange and secondment program to undertake research into energetic materials and systems, including high-performance solid rocket propellants and new systems for weapons delivery.
“These partnerships aren’t just window dressing or some idea that we might work together, they’re based on real projects (and) real work,” Dr Zelinsky said. “I’m really excited by these three new co-operative agreements.”
Technology showcase
Partnerships Week isn’t just about signing partnership agreements and a range of DST Group’s current endeavours were on display for delegates to learn more about.
Four of these showcased technologies were the Tactical Team Simulation laboratory, the Buccaneer Cubesat program, Cross Domain Desktop Compositor and a Cognitive Ergonomics briefing and demonstration.
DST Group and industry partner Rheinmetall have developed the purpose-built Tactical Team Simulation laboratory at the Edinburgh facility and work closely with Army to understand human factors.
The facility comprises of a number of individual simulators in bays, which can be linked together to support human experiments in order to understand the soldier, both as an individual and as part of a small team. The facility uses Army’s existing simulation platform (VBS3) and is also being used in the development of future training concepts, using novel ways to enhance a soldier’s ability, such as the exploration of manned/unmanned teaming.
Together with the UNSW Canberra, DST Group has developed the Buccaneer CubeSat program, the first of which will be launched by NASA in the October timeframe. DST Group developed the Buccaneer payload, including a 3.2 metre deployable antenna.
The all-Australian mission will measure the ionosphere from space and the data gathered by a high frequency receiver aboard the small satellite will provide far-field calibration measurements for future development of the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN). The mission will also explore low-earth orbital dynamics and light signatures reflected from man-made objects in space.
The award-winning Cross Domain Desktop Compositor (CDDC) has been developed by DST Group in partnership with Data 61/CSIRO to enable data from several sources, at differing security levels, to be displayed on a single computer monitor without compromising security.
The CDDC takes digital outputs from desktop computers and creates a composited cross domain solution, whereby an operator can interact with different windows on the display, from several sources, but which are isolated. Information from several sources can also be overlayed and different coloured borders to each source let the operator know at a glance which domain or security level the information comes from.
In June the program won three Australian Information Industry Association iAwards, comprising the Research and Development project of the year, Infrastructure and Platforms innovation of the year and the Public Sector and Government Markets iAward.
Arguably the most popular display at Partnerships Week however was the Cognitive Ergonomics demonstration, which allowed visitors to move a ball in a children’s game by focusing their mind on it (electrodes on the player’s head and earlobe send signals to a fan to move the ball)!
The game underscores DST Group’s ongoing work on developing a Cognitive Fitness Framework, using cognitive training technologies that can be scaled and then fielded to supplement existing Army training. The idea is to increase individual soldier performance by developing a ‘Cognitive Gym’ to support ADF High Performance Centres.
“We employ great scientists at DST but not all the best scientists work for us; there are many good ones working in academia and industry and the idea is to bring the best together to work with Defence as a team to solve problems,” Dr Zelinsky concluded. “We’re picking the best partners and we’re working with them.”
This article first appeared in the October 2017 edition of ADM.