Australian-made 3D safety tool among new technologies to save lives at Talisman Sabre 2025
Former Special Forces soldier’s lifesaving creation to lead revolutionary safety technology trials at Australia’s largest military exercise.
QLD News
Don't miss out on the headlines from QLD News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A suite of cutting-edge safety technologies designed to bring soldiers home alive from military training will be tested at Australia’s largest biennial military training exercise.
Some of the technology to be trialled at Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025 will include a homegrown 3D decision support tool that can detect potential fratricide risks, an advanced weather prediction system, as well as Artificial Intelligence programs designed to help reduce fatigue among drone operators.
The 11th iteration of Exercise Talisman Sabre is scheduled to take place from July 13-August 4 throughout Queensland, some other parts of Australia and Papua New Guinea.
Exercise Director Brigadier Damian Hill said the tech was being embraced for the first time during the multinational exercise as part an “elevated” focus on safety.
“Safety has always been our number one priority,” he said.
“Training is about learning. Talisman Sabre is about learning together with other nations.
“So we have a very strong focus on safety.”
With more than 30,000 military personnel from 19 countries involved in this year’s exercise, with three more nations expected to observe, Talisman Sabre is now the largest multinational military training exercise in the southern hemisphere.
Brigadier Hill said safety measures had been amplified in part because of the personnel fatigue revelations unveiled as a result of the investigation into a fatal MHR-90 Taipan helicopter crash that occurred during TS23.
Four men from the Australian Army Aviation’s 6th Aviation Regiment were killed in the crash.
A few years prior, three US Marines also died when their Osprey crashed off the coast of Queensland directly after Talisman Sabre 2017.
Life-saving 3D safety tool
Designed by a former Australian Special Forces officer who served with a soldier killed in a training accident, SAF-Foresight is a 3D, real-time, military exercise design and safety management software program devised to help reduce the risk of accidental deaths, particularly fratricide in live firing and military training.
Gareth Collier, 46, created the decision support tool after joining Newcastle, NSW-based SimCentric Technologies in 2015 following 19 years in the Australian Army.
Now Vice President of Strategy, Mr Collier said the program was ultimately “designed to bring soldiers home alive from military training.”
“I’ve seen these incidents result in near misses, woundings and deaths, not only in Australia but across many militaries, including serving with an outstanding soldier who was killed in a training accident,” he said.
“The driving motivation is that there has to be a better way of keeping our soldiers safe and their families from having to experience that tragedy.”
Some of the most common causes of accidental deaths in military training include vehicle, aircraft or boating crashes, fratricide – death from friendly fire during live fire exercises – exposure to the elements, drowning or heat related injuries.
The software digitises training areas and terrain in three dimensions, allowing commanders to visualise scenarios, identify risks and receive immediate alerts about potential dangers during planning and in real-time during exercises.
It incorporates everything from real-time vehicle speeds, aircraft flight paths and soldier placements on military firing ranges.
Mr Collier said the software application had been built in collaboration with the ADF since 2019 after he first presented it to them in 2017.
“The intent of the system is to provide visibility and awareness of emerging risks allowing mitigation,” he said.
“Its entire purpose is to reduce preventable deaths in training.”
How weather knowledge can save lives
SimCentric has partnered with The Weather Company to incorporate real-time weather data into their live training software to further enhance safety.
Based in Atlanta, Georgia in the US, the forecasting and information technology business is participating in their first-ever military exercise by integrating their Weatherverse Planner product into SAF-Foresight.
The plug-in detects and analyses weather-related impacts on training exercises in specific locations, enabling better safety measures to be implemented and, in turn, better outcomes for training exercises.
Sheri Bachstein, The Weather Company president, said Weatherverse provides current and forecast weather data, visualisations and risk analytics’ for that specific weather.
“We’re going to be able to provide … the weather data, what the current data is and the forecast,” she said.
“We’re going to be providing visualisations so you can see the weather, and then we’ll provide risk analytics that will better understand what that weather scenario can do within that training.
“(For example), if the training is using a Blackhawk helicopter, you can select the vehicle in the tool to see how weather may specifically impact that vehicle over a specific location.”
Mrs Bachstein said most military simulations used synthetic weather for training purposes, which did not accurately reflect real-life scenarios.
The former television producer said using actual weather data could help save lives as it ensured commanders could make realistic decisions.
“It absolutely can help keep people safe,” she said.
“A couple of examples from a defence perspective – think about weather’s impact on soldiers and death that may be related to extreme heat or extreme cold – so there’s risk associated with that in the elements.
“Think about injuries from parachuting in high winds … or threats to helicopters in electrical storms.
“So it’s a need that will lead to saving lives, protecting lives and it can also lead to protecting equipment – the very expensive equipment the military uses.”
Other injury or death risks also emerge if there’s low visibility during helicopter manoeuvres, misjudgment of tidal patterns during amphibious operations or from fire danger when using high explosive munitions.
AI lessening fatigue
Manpower and fatigue among drone operators will also be reduced with the help of artificial intelligence thanks to a Brisbane software company.
Athena Artificial Intelligence, which specialises in AI-enabled computer vision and decision support for Defence applications, will be involved in Talisman Sabre for the first time by providing automated surveillance and reconnaissance for various missions.
Athena AI managing director Stephen Bornstein said artificial intelligence will be used to provide decision support for military applications.
“We provide software to reduce the brain power that operators and war fighters need when carrying out both mundane and complex military tasks,” he said.
“This includes computer vision for surveillance, and geospatial planning tools.”
Mr Bornstein said the technology was designed to help reduce mental fatigue.
“Essentially, drone operators were unable to look at the screen for long enough without being really drained and tired so they would start miss things on the screen,” he said.
“They’re looking at a video feed … trying to identify targets and see people, but most of the time they’re flying over terrain with no targets, they’re not seeing anything.
“They might have to look at the screen every second for an hour, then they are so tired they have to rotate.”
He said an operation could go for eight hours, resulting in the need to alternate several team members.
“Athena vision autonomously detects the targets and provides alerts, reducing the risk of missing targets and freeing up the drone pilots to do other tasks,” Mr Bornstein said.
“This capability allows our defence force to scale mass without personnel.
“With additional autonomy we don’t need humans viewing video feeds as drones can now carry our surveillance on their own.”
Shortening the decision making cycle
Another US company, BigBear.ai, will showcase its ConductorOS platform, an AI data and sensor orchestration system that coordinates information from other technology, such as from unmanned vehicles or drones.
The software is designed to update and relay information from various integrated AI models more rapidly to human decision makers, enabling air and ground units to act more swiftly.
BigBear.ai’s Director of Technical Delivery, Samantha Hamilton, 31, said it helped “shorten the decision making cycle.”
“ConductorOS enables more rapid insight by reducing the amount of data that has to get back to the operator,” she said.
“(It) can be thought of as the conductor of an orchestra, where each instrument represents a different sensor, AI model, compute platform, or communication system in a complex operational environment.
“Just like a musical conductor doesn’t play the instruments themselves but ensures each plays in harmony … it coordinates them.”
Mrs Hamilton, of Annapolis, Maryland, said part of TS25 would have “an emphasis on unmanned vehicles.”
“So, unmanned ground vehicles, drones, unmanned aerial systems, unmanned surface vessels,” she said.
“With ConductorOS, we’re working to integrate with these advanced machine learning techniques in a way that is easily integrated and communicated back to the operators so they can make enhanced decisions.
“We are pushing the boundaries on what we can do with these autonomous vessels.”
Mrs Hamilton said pairing military forces with AI was advantageous.
“There are things only humans can do – we have cognitive ability, we have incredible reasoning qualities – they’re things only humans can do,” she said.
“There are also things only machines can do, like identifying patterns and identifying anomalies.
“So, when we pair humans with machines and bring together the things that they both can do best, we force multiply our military.
“What ConductorOS does is accelerates the speed with which that can happen.”
As a basic example, Mrs Hamilton said the camera on a self-driving car might detect an object or a person in the road instead of a car and immediately stop.
But if it’s something the unmanned vehicle does not recognise, it cannot make its own decision.
“The more complex decisions that need to be made, those are the ones that get routed back to the human-in-the-loop, the person who has the cognitive ability to make decisions that carry more weight,” she said.
Mrs Hamilton said it will be the first time BigBear.ai technology has been showcased in Exercise Talisman Sabre but the second time employees have participated in a military exercise in Australia.
The large-scale exercise comprises live-fire and field training, amphibious landings, ground force manoeuvres, air combat, and marine operations.
The majority of the battle drills are anticipated to be carried out throughout Queensland and in the Coral Sea, with some also occurring in the Northern Territory, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and – for the first time – on Christmas Island, about 2600km from Perth in the Indian Ocean.
Originally published as Australian-made 3D safety tool among new technologies to save lives at Talisman Sabre 2025
Head shaved and held captive: Teen allegedly abducted, assaulted
A teenager was allegedly kidnapped from a Cairns North street and held captive for two days where she was assaulted multiple times, including with a weapon, and her head shaved.
Top Brisbane restaurant to shut after chef’s shock departure
One of Brisbane’s most celebrated restaurants will close after the team behind it split unexpectedly.