About us

DASI conducts research in the design, integration, and modelling of complex Defence and Engineering Systems. It has research programs inautonomous and unmanned systems, exploitation of biology for sensing systems, micro air vehicles, acoustic propagation, tomography, multi-user/multi-vehicle autonomy, creativity/innovation, and systems engineering competencies.

Key research focus and outcomes:

• Acoustic tomography - Acoustic propagation, signal processing and time delay estimation to simultaneously determine atmospheric temperature and wind velocity fields in 3D (or oceanic currents & temperature).
•  Multi-UAV teaming and UAV airspace integration - Acoustic sensing, extended aperture microphone design, development of trusted trajectory planning techniques for assured sensing.
• Trusted autonomy - Development of multi-user/multi-robot interaction to examine/determine impact of errors, autonomy, HMI, teaming structures, technology, etc. on "calibrated" trust and user reliance of autonomous systems.
• Evaluating autonomy - Developing and understanding metrics/rubrics/tasks for assessing the value of and examining and calibrating autonomy/autonomous systems and robotic teams (humans & machines).
• Biological sensing - Development and exploitation of full neurological sensing model for (EO/IR): small target/motion detection, low light/high clutter/noise target detection, signal conditioning for vision-based object classification, robotic navigation.
• Tracking & time delay estimation - Target motion analysis and target tracking algorithms for passive Electronic Warfare (EW) and acoustic sensing, recursive Bayesian estimation for highly non-linear problems.
•  Competencies in systems engineering/engineers- Establishment of metrics/frameworks for measuring creativity in staff and organisations, competencies and vocational suitability of staff for innovative and creative and systems engineering tasks
• Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) design, autopilots, navigation systems - development of non-standard sensor systems based on biological systems, 3-DOF ornithopter control for MAVs, miniaturised navigation & AHRS systems, image processing for navigation

DASI is an integral part of UniSA's world-class School of Engineering. It combines academic rigour with high quality applied research and uses a combination of academic, industry and defence experience to take a holistic approach to solving problems for the entire system development and deployment cycle.

Our innovative research and high quality teaching and training is aimed at allowing the viability of complex new technologies, products, practices, infrastructure acquisitions and capabilities to be developed concurrently with the conception of new deployment and service approaches, and hence reducing project risk and total system cost.

We maintain significant government and industry relationships with the Department of Defence, the Defence Science & Technology Group (DST Group) and other key players in the Australian defence industry sector. We also maintain significant connections with a large number of small and medium enterprises in the non-Defence sector. Our extensive collaborative relationships with universities and government research centres in the US, UK and Asia supports our leading edge research.

Our postgraduate degrees are industry-relevant.

We also offer short courses which can be customised to the needs of clients and delivered on-site or remotely.

If you are interested in becoming involved with DASI as a future student, researcher or client, please contact us today.