Allied forces must be able to respond faster and more flexibly to Chemical Biological Radiological or Nuclear (CBRN) contamination events; achieve enhanced situational awareness; and manoeuvre safely, effectively and unimpeded in complex contaminated environments for prolonged periods of time. For this reason, the Australian Department of Defence stood-up the Operating in a CBRN Environment (OCE) “STaR Shot” Project. Its mission: to enable, through the injection of novel concepts and technological innovations, the joint force to operate safely and effectively in contested CBRN threat environments.

One area of focus for the OCE STaR Shot is the development of an Active Collaborative CBRN Environmental Sense and Sense-making System (ACCESSS) - a scalable network of hundreds to thousands of low- size weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) sensors that sample the environment for CBRN threats and other information required to identify, characterise and monitor CBRN threats.

The ACCESSS is not just about sensors though - other areas of attention include distribution methods, autonomous platforms and autonomous agent teaming, robots, data fusion, advanced analytics and decision support systems approaches, secure networked communications and interoperability with extant systems.

Why is OCE STaR Shot giving a talk at the PBRI Symposium though? Well, our innovation project has a strong “dual-use” strategic mindset. We believe core technologies of ACCESSS could be applied to key challenges faced by the agricultural sector such as chemical spray drift and widely distributed cost effective early warning of pest incursion, amongst others.

This talk will focus on recent ACCESSS developments of potential interest to the PBRI stakeholder/membership base and presents an invitation from our project to more deeply engage in, and explore, the cross-sector opportunities that may be present.