Sydney tech firm Advanced Navigation has landed a $7.5 million contract to provide the Department of Defence with a prototype inertial navigation system after years of proving the technology under smaller deals with the department.
The extension of the work comes under a new 14-month contract and caps of a bumper year for the company that included a $108 million series B raise, award wins, and the launch of its subsea robotics centre in Perth.
Founded by Xavier Orr and Chris Shaw in 2011, Advanced Navigation has raised more than $134 million, with Main Sequence Ventures and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull among its investors.
It offers a range of AI-based navigation systems for land, sea, air and space applications that are designed and manufactured in Australia and used by the likes of NASA, Tesla, Google and Apple.
It has been working with the Department of Defence since 2013, when it sold it an Inertial Navigation System (INS) for just $13,000.
An INS uses several sensors that can continuously calculate the position, orientation, and velocity of a moving object without the need for external reference. They are commonly found on ships, aircraft, submarines, guided missiles, and spacecraft.
Advanced Navigation offers a range of INS devices, ranging from cost effective single antenna devices to eight millimetre accurate devices with fibre optic gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, and a pressure sensor.
As one of the largest manufacturers of INS devices, Advanced Navigation products are used in everything from farming robots to autonomous vehicles, and have been sold to US defence companies for use in unmanned air systems drones.
The company been awarded dozens of contracts with the Department of Defence over the last decade for a variety of components, engineering systems and navigations systems, including several for INS.
Under the new and largest-to-date $7.5 million contract, Advanced Navigation will deliver a “prototype inertial navigation system capable of maintaining positional accuracy for long durations”, according to a Department of Defence spokesperson, who declined to say what force will use it or what capability it relates to.
“The company has been working with Defence on specialised navigation solutions for some years. This project is an extension of previous work,” the spokesperson told InnovationAus.com.
Advanced Navigation last year won the Industry 4.0 category at the InnovationAus Awards for Excellence for its underwater autonomous drone innovation.
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