Lockheed Martin Australia’s Science, Technology, Engineering, Leadership and Research Laboratory (STELaRLab) has successfully completed a virtual demonstration of an integrated Counter IED system in the company’s Endeavour Centre in Canberra.
Known as Agile Shield, the system has been developed under the Next Generation Technologies Fund (NGTF) framework, as part of DST Group’s Counter Improvised Threats Grand Challenge (CIT-GC) and is initially at least designed to counter uncrewed aerial systems.
STELaRLab was awarded a $9 million contract in 2021 and has developed Agile Shield in partnership with Clearbox Systems, In-Track Solutions, Silentium Defence, Department 13 and Trakka Corporation
Lockheed Martin Australia says the system brings together a number of Australian sensors and effectors with an open mission architecture to provide a rapid, scalable and flexible response to airborne threats. STELaRLab’s contribution included development of the open mission systems architecture and acting as the prime systems integrator.
“We were able to firstly demonstrate in a synthetic environment, sensors and effectors operating against threats – specifically in this case, UAS threat sets,” explained Keren Reynolds, STELaRLab’s Integrated Systems Lead for Agile Shield, on 29 March.
“Over the last two days we’ve completed a series of demonstrations; we’ve hosted five different sensor demonstrations to show the capability.”
The team has also collaborated with the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which has included some funding and the exchange of data.
The virtual demonstration, conducted last week, did not involve kinetic effectors, but focussed on Directed Energy and Electronic Attack capabilities, together with a further but undisclosed effector supplied by Department 13.
“We demonstrated an advanced workflow for how you counter improvised threats, all the way from mission planning through to how you would track threats and generate intelligent engagement options to consider and authorise, in real time,” added Kevin McDonald Agile Shield Chief Engineer at STELaRLab.
Following the successful trial, work is now underway to increase the technical maturity of the system from the current TRL 4 or TRL 5 and develop a deployable system ahead of field trials towards the end of the year.