A modest Canberra company has emerged as a major exporter of drones, selling them to the US, Canadian, UK and European and Australian defence forces and to major international defence companies such as Northrop Grumman, and Anduril.
But these aren’t the kind of drones often seen in imagery from the Ukrainian conflict, zooming in on Russian vehicles and troops then exploding.
These are basic drones whose sole purpose in their brief lives is to serve as realistic training targets for counter-drone systems. That can include guns, lasers and radio frequency jamming.
Where many other companies have developed drones for surveillance and attack, Boresight saw a need for inexpensive quadcopter drones for testing of counter-drone systems and for training their operators.
"We built Boresight on the principle that asymmetric advantage shouldn't be expensive," Boresight Managing Director, Justin Olde, said.
"The drone threat is asymmetric by nature. A commercial quadcopter costing thousands can cause millions of dollars of damage or compromise a critical operation.
“Our job is to make sure forces can train against that threat, test their systems against it and develop the doctrine to defeat it at a cost that makes large-scale training and testing sustainable."
Boresight, based in the Canberra suburb of Fyshwick, has sold more than 5,000 systems over the past five years.
The company was established as a subsidiary of Canberra-based defence and intelligence company Criterion Solutions which saw the need for purpose-built, consistent and high-quality target drones to serve the emerging counter-uncrewed aerial systems (C-UAS) market.
The BQ-400 Raider target drone was developed to meet that need. Sales growth drove the establishment of Boresight as a standalone entity focused on manufacturing and marketing low-cost, disposable UAS at scale.
Olde said the rapid proliferation of low-cost drones had fundamentally changed the nature of modern conflict and public security.
“From commercial quadcopters repurposed for battlefield reconnaissance to sophisticated loitering munitions capable of precision strikes on armoured vehicles, the threat posed by hostile UAS is no longer theoretical. It is a daily operational reality for militaries around the world, and one that Ukraine has brought into sharp focus for defence planners in every Western capital,” he said.
The response has been the development and fielding of counter-UAS systems able to detect, track and neutralise hostile drones. This has become one of the fastest-growing segments of global defence spending.
“But effective Counter-UAS training requires realistic, repeatable and affordable targets. That is precisely the gap Boresight was built to fill,” Olde stated.
"Every Counter-UAS system in the world needs to be tested against realistic drone targets before it can be deployed.
“And every soldier operating that system needs to train against the real threat. You cannot train effectively against a threat you have never seen fly. Boresight provides cost effective targets and an easy to use ground control system and that enables the consistency, repeatability and reliability that military training demands."
Boresight offers a range of products.
Its flagship remains the BQ-400 Raider quadcopter, a compact, low-cost target drone weighing 1.3kg and capable of speeds up to 65 km/h and with flight endurance of up to 25 minutes.
This closely resembles the performance of commercial quadcopters commonly repurposed by adversaries for battlefield use.
Then there’s BQ-750 Quadcopter, a larger target platform with a 2kg payload capacity and up to 45 minutes endurance.
Boresight doesn’t just do target drones. Its BS-350 quadcopter is an Australian-made alternative to Chinese camera drones, with capability for live video and a 5km range. This is intended for surveillance by military and law enforcement.
In development is the BQ-300 quadcopter, a high-speed, first-person-view target capable of 150 km/h to replicate the type of attack drones used extensively in recent conflicts.
Then there’s a pair of fixed wing target drones replicating small adversary fixed wing drones and loitering munitions.
Across all its platforms, Boresight operates a proprietary Ground Control System capable of managing multiple drones simultaneously in both one-to-one and one-to-many (swarming) configurations.