The NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency is now accepting submissions for its fifth annual Defence Innovation Challenge.
And this year, we are doing things differently. For the first time, following NITEC, the most promising proposals may subsequently be invited to bid for a contract in this area. As a part of the bidding process, invited winners will be offered the opportunity to demonstrate their solutions in a NATO environment, to a relevant NATO audience.
Through the challenge, the NCI Agency aims to incentivize innovations that could be scaled to the NATO environment. Startups and small and medium-sized enterprises from all 29 NATO Nations are particularly encouraged to apply.
Dr Michael Street, Head of Innovation and Data Science at the NCI Agency, said: "We are excited to pilot this new way of bringing tangible solutions to NATO problems. The Defence Innovation Challenge is a fantastic opportunity to show the users directly how your innovative technological solution could improve this aspect of radar performance."
For the Challenge, the NCI Agency is accepting submissions which focus on improving the performance of aerial radar. Solutions will address one or more of the following:
- Correlate Aerial Discovery Radar outputs, combining real-time outputs from two or more radar sources to produce a single, combined result aircraft position.
- Automatically convert aircraft plots (location) to tracks (vector).
- Provide confidence levels of their outputs.
- Operate in bad weather conditions or spoofing.
- Be capable of modification to operate on civilian or non-civilian radar data.
Solutions may use artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to approach these challenges, but solutions are not limited only to these technologies.