Australia is continuing to ramp up activities under the long-opaque technology pillar of AUKUS, pushing artificial intelligence to assist in submarine tracking and maritime autonomous vehicles.
While most of a trilateral weekend meeting in California focused on the nuclear-powered submarines that are the centrepiece of AUKUS, a few other technologies got a mention.
In a joint statement following the meetings, defence ministers of the countries noted that their three defence forces had cooperated to demonstrate using AI on board craft like Australia’s P-8A maritime patrollers to gather and process data from each nation’s sonobuoys.
This would “allow for timely high-volume data analysis, improving our anti-submarine warfare capabilities”, the communique, signed by defence minister Richard Marles, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin, and UK secretary of state for defence Grant Shapps said.
AI is also the focus of a program the communique dubbed Resilient and Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Technologies (RAAIT).
RAAIT will bring AI and machine learning (ML) to “force protection, precision targeting, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance”, with an operational target some time in 2024.
Australia’s defence department earlier this year started assembling the skills needed to feed data into the AI and ML models.
Other technology projects identified in the communique include space surveillance, autonomous maritime vehicles, and quantum navigation.
The Harold E Holt radio facility in Exmouth, WA, is to receive a new deep space radar instrument.
The government said the deep space advanced radar capability will be a collaboration between all AUKUS partners, providing 24-hour all-weather tracking of both space junk, and potentially hostile objects.
The Exmouth station already hosts space radar capabilities such as the space surveillance telescope, which became operational in Australia last year after it was relocated from its original US site.
However, the SST is a nighttime-only site, whereas the proposed new instrument would operate 24 hours a day.
The three countries have agreed to conduct joint experiments to enhance the sophistication, capability, and interoperability of their autonomous marine systems.
Quantum “positioning, navigation, and timing” – the application of technologies like atom interferometry to enhance both the partners’ operations in “GPS-degraded environments” and to “enhance stealth in the undersea domain”.