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Britain says its Royal Air Force experiments with drone swarms show they can overwhelm enemy defences – and the concept could be ready for action in a war.
Air Chief Marshall Sir Mike Wigston told the Global Air and Space Chiefs Conference 2022 in London last week that the RAF’s 216 Test and Evaluation Squadron and the Rapid Capabilities Office trialled five drone types in 13 experiments with various payloads and equipment over three years.
“We are exploring new models of capability delivery and accelerated production ‘when we need them’ rather than ‘in case we need them’, from the twin jet 3D-printed Pizookie, to commercially available large drones fitted with novel payloads, to large quadcopters,” he said.
Overwhelming enemy air defences
Royal United Services Institute defence analyst Justin Bronk said swarming means throwing enough expendable drones at a defensive radar and interceptor position so as to overwhelm them.
It can be effective, but only to a certain point because small and cheap drones lack the range and speed and “if you want things to go fast and far, they’re going to be jet-propelled and they’re going to cost a fair bit,” Bronk says.
So far, Ukraine has been using a small, nimble, and re-deployable drone called “The Punisher” to carry out missions against Russia, but Bronk says drone swarms are a bit more complicated.
He reckons that getting drones swarms close enough to sophisticated air defences with a range of hundreds of kilometres requires risky – and potentially pricy – insertion tactics that negate the widely cited cost benefit of cheap, small drones.
The company provides remote-sensing surveillance cameras for public and remote places such as beaches, parks, bushlands and other isolated facilities.
Its AI technology can process complex scenarios very quickly with a high degree of accuracy, with features including facial and object recognition.
And they’ve just raised $1.862 million at $0.036 per share to finance market expansion across regional Australia, development of its globalised modular platform, and the purchase of additional inventory to mitigate supply chain risk.
The company says it anticipates this next phase of growth will take it through to EBITDA breakeven.
Spectur also launched a Security Purchase Plan (SPP) offer to raise $500,000.
X2M owns a patented technology that can be connected with water and gas meters, enabling utlities to obtain live data from the one platform – and just added five new customers in South Korea.
The company says the combined value of the contracts total almost $2 million, bringing the number of Enterprise and Government customers across the X2M group to 50 and the number of South Korean municipalities utilising the X2M IoT platform to 26.
“Our success in securing more and more municipalities in South Korea and progressively converting each of their addressable markets onto the X2M IoT platform is very pleasing,” X2M CEO Mohan Jesudason said.
“Jangsu County have elected to convert the entire addressable market in the county in one contract allowing them to obtain the full benefits of water digitisation immediately.”
The video tech player says its FY22 unaudited revenue is $38m and that it’s well-placed for FY23 with $18m in current inventory.
The company puts this growth down to increasing the people employed in engineering and sales roles by 96%, securing partnerships with six global media and video communications platforms and introducing a new series of Robotic PTZ camers aimed at education and entry level live production markets.
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