All-terrain autonomous robotic target for live-fire marksman

The project aims to build an all-terrain robotic target for live-fire military training, to validate customer requirements and develop a commercialisation strategy.   Marathon Robotics’ current product is a two-wheeled balancing target, used by the Australian Defence Force and being trialled by the US Marine Corps. The project will benefit Australia in terms of export earnings and create flow-on benefits for Australian specialist engineering companies.

Tobias Kaupp, Marathon Robotics Director, said “the Commercialisation Australia grant has given us the necessary funds to accelerate the schedule for expanding our product line, both in terms of technical development and commercialisation. Another great benefit of Commercialisation Australia is the help our Case Manager contributes such as valuable feedback on our project plan and our corporate strategy in general.”

 Vodcast

Dr Alex Brooks, Director of Marathon Robotics, talks about his company's experience with Commercialisation Australia.  Play/dowload the vodcast
or read the transcript:

We’re a company that builds autonomous robotic targets for military training. They can move and think for themselves, they’re totally unlike any other kind of target that exists on the market today. Ours look, behave and move like humans. For example, they can be reactive. If one target gets hit, it can send a message to its buddies who will respond to that by scattering and running for cover.

We started out as academics - we know a lot about the technical side of things. A lot of the challenge was really all the business side of things.

In the very early days we got a COMET grant, a fairly small amount of money but it just made a huge difference for us. That was for business advice specifically, and more recently we were awarded a Commercialisation Australia grant to develop a new product for an entirely new application. So we had developed a two-wheeled version of our target for urban environments and we realised that the majority of the world’s training ranges - you know, gravel, unpaved terrain - and to crack open this much larger market, we needed a 4WD all-terrain version.

In addition to the other support, we take advantage of the Government R&D Tax Concession. I mean, most of what we do in here is R&D - you can probably tell by the surroundings we don’t spend our money on much else. Without the financial support, we would have spent most of our time out there searching for funding rather than working on the technology; pushing the product to market.

Part of the Commercialisation Australia grant: we’re provided with a Case Manager, Nigel, in our case. Nigel’s been very helpful as a kind of a sounding board for the sorts of things that don’t come so naturally to us as academics and engineers. What he brings to the table is an experienced guy with a lot of commercialisation experience and experience running companies, to point out things we might not have thought of, like corporate structure, structuring contracts to allow us to focus on the really important stuff of building the technology that we sell to customers.

Early on when we first started the company, we looked at moving into a warehouse in the suburbs somewhere and we made the excellent decision to move into ATP Innovations instead. It’s a fantastic environment; I can’t say enough good things in terms of all the infrastructure that was set up, all the business advice, so we found an Accountant, Lawyer, insurance all through the ATPI connections. The Sydney Entrepreneurship Network isn’t that large and being in ATPI instantly made all these connections for us.

Without the ongoing Government support we’d be in a very different place, I think. Certainly our growth would be much slower.

In terms of the future, what we have now is a robotic target, but really what we have is the technology for autonomous mobility and you can think of a lot of different applications for this. We have plenty of ideas, but to get a product off the ground obviously is a huge undertaking, and we have enough work cut out for ourselves at the moment with the military market.