Thales and Visionary Machines to Collaborate on Passive Drone Detection Technology

Thales is working with Australian company Visionary Machines (VM) to explore the potential of combining their C-UAS threat detection and tracking algorithms with Thales’ wide area scanning hardware to create a best-in-class, completely passive C-UAS detection capability.

The work is at the exploratory stage, and a trial is planned for August to assess the technology’s performance against a variety of UAV threats.

For Thales, the advantage of working with VM is that its software delivers reliable long-range detection with very low false-alarm rates and provides accurate target ranging — similar to active radar — to determine the distance to a threat.

The combination of Thales’ scanning hardware and VM’s detection and tracking software presents the potential to create a best-in-class detection capability to provide much needed protection to soldiers on the battlefield.