The Sensing for Asset Protection with Integrated Electronic Networked Technology (SAPIENT) multi-sensor autonomous processing and fusion system developed by the UK Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has undergone successful trials with NATO.
As a result, ‘many suppliers’ of C-UAS technology have now adopted the SAPIENT standard and it has already been adopted by the UK MoD as the standard for C-sUAS technology, Dstl claimed on 5 January.
SAPIENT ‘successfully facilitated more than 70 connections’ between C-UAS and C2 systems for information exchange in a recent C-UAS technical interoperability exercise, Dstl added.
The exercise in November 2021 included testing the SAPIENT Interface Control Document as a candidate draft standard for C-UAS.
Using open architecture, SAPIENT enables autonomous sensors to make local decisions without constant attention from a human operator, fusing the output in an AI-enabled central hub.
David Lugton, Dstl project technical authority for C-UAS systems, said that the recent technical evaluation by NATO ‘paves the way to an open commercial market of SAPIENT-compliant C-UAS components and places the architecture as a crucial enabler as the demand for rapid C-UAS interoperability increases across the NATO nations’.