Defence Notes

UK MoD awards £2million in contracts for Map the Gap

15th July 2021 - 18:13 GMT | by The Shephard News Team

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Argonaut is Ultrabeam's latest fully anphibious vehicle; designed, constructed and tested in 3 months at our HQ in Hayle, Cornwall. (Photo: Ultrabeam)

DASA has selected three small and medium-sized businesses to receive £2milion in contracts to help the military cross rivers, streams and bogs.

The Map the Gap: Phase 2 competition progresses as the Defence and Security Accelerator has awarded contracts worth £2million to three small and medium-sized businesses.

Digital Concepts Engineering aims to develop a low signature, autonomous unmanned air and ground system with the capability to deploy sensors to collect the desired gap measurements.

Ultrabeam has been selected for its product Argonaut 2, an autonomous, amphibious kinematic survey vehicle.

The Argonaut’s modular survey sensor package includes LiDAR, sonar, current profiler and electric cone penetrometer. It also implements AI machine learning technology to boost autonomy.

ISS Group has put forward a UAV rotorcraft solution equipped with 3D photogrammetric, EO/IR and downward viewing IR cameras, Simultaneous localisation and mapping sensor, ground-penetrating radar and bathymetric/topographic LiDAR.

Map the Gap aims to develop semi-autonomous reconnaissance and survey systems that help the military to cross obstacles such as rivers, streams, bogs and other ‘wet gaps’.

Replacing manned reconnaissance with a remote BLoS system will reduce the threat to life and offer the ability to survey multiple crossing sites in a more timely and efficient manner.