Following Shield AI’s acquisition of Sentient Vision Systems in 2024, the company has continued to increase its presence in Australia, including opening their new headquarters facility in Melbourne on July 1.
ADM was invited to tour the facility and meet with staff to discuss the company’s products and defence opportunities.
Shield AI is an American company with international presence that provides autonomous ISR and pilot solutions through a combination of their capabilities, including the Hivemind autonomous system, the Visual Detection and Ranging (ViDAR) system with its Kestrel Tracker, and the V-BAT drone platform.
The company has been actively flying ISR missions in Ukraine with this combination since 2024 and continues to provide long-range fire support and coordination of strikes with F-16s.
“We've been around for about 10 years,” Christian Gutierrez, Vice President Hivemind Solutions said. “Our founder, Brandon Tseng, is a former Navy SEAL who was deployed into a conflict zone and saw that there was missing intelligence that was needed to protect soldiers in combat. When he started this company, he wanted to use intelligent systems to defend service members and civilians.”
The ViDAR system combines multiple optical and infrared sensors with the Kestrel Tracker, an AI based system for detecting moving and stationary objects of interest in land and maritime environments. This allows a single ISR platform to cover a larger area for a given mission profile when compared to other systems while also reducing the amount of information that needs to be transmitted to an operator.
“We have a system of multiple AIs that finds everything of interest to the operator,” Mark Palmer, Vice President Vision Systems said. “Effectively this means you can take five or six sensors and ViDAR will look through those continuously, picking out everything of interest, and delivering that to a single operator, dramatically expanding the area that you can survey.”
Palmer also noted that the system is completely passive and that all image processing and AI analysis is performed on the platform. He advised ADM that this allows an ISR drone such as V-BAT to operate fully autonomously with no communication signals, gather information, and then communicate its findings of interest only on return or once safely outside of a designated area. By only supplying items of interest, communications are rapid to help reduce the chance of detection, and assessment of the information can be performed quickly and effectively.
Extensive engineering has allowed the ViDAR and Hivemind systems to be accommodated in small form factor packages ranging from two to four kilograms so they can be flown on group 2 or 3 unmanned systems where payload is restricted.
“Algorithms can be lighter on compute and still deliver that high performance,” Gutierrez said. “You still need things like GPUs, but we can also form fit and configure an autonomy solution to use a standard CPU that you find on any aircraft today. There's creativity there, there's ingenuity there, and technology is also catching up.”
Autonomy in Australia
When Shield AI purchased Sentient Vision Systems it gained access to almost 21 years of working with the ADF to provide ViDAR and Kestrel for ScanEagles and other early drones.
“We've continually updated and continually worked with them,” Palmer said. “We've done a lot of innovation with the ADF and that is continuing now, including discussions just recently with ASCA.”
Palmer told ADM that they’re establishing projects to help the ADF understand how autonomy can benefit their operations, including a recent test where their system was able to pick up everything of interest across the ACT in 90 minutes.
“The ability to be able to find and see everything over that large area, right down to small drones, is a really key part of the modern sort of operations,” he said. “V-BAT lets us get a group 3 drone assembled and launched in less than 15 minutes to then provide ISR capability over a large area for the next 10 hours. The combination of ViDAR and VBAT is really a key capability going forward.”
“We're doing a lot of great things in Ukraine that Australia wants to replicate here,” said Gutierrez. “We've just recently wrapped up several meetings in Canberra with senior leaders and there's a lot of excitement to bring us on board.”
When asked for his views on AUKUS, Gutierrez noted that Shield AI is already seeing benefits from Pillar 2’s information sharing agreements that are allowing technology to be exported quickly. “I think having AUKUS there, having that express lane, if you will, to be able to pass information back and forth between the USA and Australia is super game-changing.”
Both Gutierrez and Palmer noted the importance of accelerating the procurement process, highlighting that investments in autonomous systems help to unlock value including reduced logistical support and training operators in less time. “More than just saying we need to spend money, we really need to learn to move quickly, efficiently, and get this technology, which is changing so rapidly, into the warfighter's hands much quicker, then you'll see they'll be far more efficient,” Palmer said.
“What Ukraine is showing us is that if you don't have an acquisition system that enables you to upgrade your technology at the edge, at the pace of the war, you're going to be behind in the fight,” Gutierrez said.
Shield AI has identified the demand for their capabilities is present in Australia, with Gutierrez telling ADM they need to ensure they can grow and scale to provide the capacity required to meet that demand: “We want to use the Australian workforce to develop that technology and deliver it to the Australian Defence Force.”
Sentient Vision Systems was started in Melbourne, working closely with Monash University’s computer vision group, with a lot of staff coming from there in addition to the computer vision groups at Queensland University of Technology and Queensland University.
Following the purchase of Sentient and subsequent expansion, Shield AI currently has over 40 engineers and a total workforce in Melbourne of almost 60 people, with plans to expand to 70 or more by the end of the year.
“It’s not just bringing a product here,’ Palmer said. “We understand that from an autonomy point of view, it needs to be done locally. You need to have every element local at the top level, so that's where we're building a team of top-level engineers here to be able to work really closely and learn with the ADF. The fact that we have six staff members with PhDs shows the level and quality of capability that we have here in Melbourne.”
The sovereign approach also applies to sales of Australian-developed technology to foreign clients, as the ISR capability being demonstrated to the ADF and used operationally in Ukraine is attracting increasing attention overseas. Palmer told ADM that they design their capabilities to be easily and quickly manufactured in another country rather than attempting to perform all the work in Australia. The use of local partners reduces supply lines, increases responsiveness and resilience, and removes the need to fund development of manufacturing facilities that then need to be kept occupied.
“We know the amount of engineering talent we have here and what we're unlocking,” said Gutierrez. “The number of people who want to come and get involved here is incredible. They don't have to move to the US, they can stay home, and they can provide technology for their country, so it's amazing.”