Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

After 5 years in skunk works development, FiberSense publicly revealed a ground-breaking new technology called VIDAR™.

VIDAR™, an acronym for Vibration Detection and Ranging, is a new class of wide area sensor system for recording, labelling and visualising objects and events in real-time through the capture and analysis of vibrations which are collected across large geographical grids using fibre optic cables.

Despite only being publicly announced, VIDAR™ has already been utilised to protect the critical infrastructure of its development customers across Asia Pacific, including Superloop’s terrestrial fibre networks in Singapore and Australia, Transgrid HV terrestrial assets in Sydney, shore ends of Basslink’s HV undersea power cable between Tasmania and Victoria and front-haul networks of submarine cable operators Southern Cross Cable Networks. These total deployments have already detected, classified and notified over 26,000 events and now operates with a false negative detection rate of 0.011%.

VIDAR™ was conceived by FiberSense’s Founder and CEO, Dr Mark Englund. This new technology is able to use existing telecom fibre assets to detect and capture the minute vibrations given off by nearby objects, which are transmitted to a centralised digital platform. This platform then uses specialised digital signal processing (DSP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digitise, categorise, label and – if necessary – action these vibrations.

The sensing systems and data are concentrated into a real-time digital platform called SuperSoniQ, which is accessible as a cloud service. With the foundations of the SuperSoniQ platform and IP completed over the last 5 years, the company is now focusing our research and development on a few key areas.

The first is expanding the portfolio of asset protection including road infrastructure (vehicle tracking, traffic analysis, crash detection, road work activity logging), water assets (digging activity, leak detection), rail infrastructure (rail asset tracking, level crossing data), undersea power cables (anchor drag events), as well as earthquake event monitoring and high spatial resolution post event analysis. The second is new integrated photonics hardware, AI and a new suite of detection capabilities based on advanced signal processing.

In addition to the R&D, FiberSense is in the process of building an entire digital city grid using VIDAR™, with an emphasis on vehicle tracking. This city-wide grid will be the first in which all vehicles are “digitised” and captured using a VIDAR™ grid to be represented in a dynamic virtual world, in real-time. Rather than just the small set of “connected” vehicles as can be seen currently in the V2x or IoT models, this technology is a game changer for autonomous vehicles as it will provide the first platform from which all vehicles across an entire city grid can be seen.

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