Battlefield Integrated Tactical Exploitation of Sensors (BITES)

BITES has been developed to integrate with existing and future Australian Defence Force (ADF) sensors. BITES enables the concept of Network Centric Warfare by linking sensors and decision-makers in a way that increases situational awareness and the capacity to act decisively.

The BITES system has been proven to integrate the Ground Surveillance Radar (GSR), Thermal Surveillance System (TSS) and Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) into a single sensor network. BITES can associate, fuse and synthesise track data from these sensor types to produce a coherent, composite track database for display and dissemination.

BITES will enable increased operational effectiveness through the provision of trusted information between linked sensors in support of the tactical commander in the field.

The BITES system will link together the existing and future sensor suites of the ADF to provide tactical commanders with critical, real-time, fused information. This will allow the timely aggregation of information from multiple sources to support rapid decision making. BITES can automatically fuse data received from multiple heterogeneous sensors. This provides improved track accuracy and multi-modal information available for tracks (e.g., radar track can be associated with thermal images).

The BITES system has been developed to operate over severely bandwidth constrained communication systems such as Combat Net Radio (CNR). Through the application of sophisticated scheduling algorithms, the network operator is able to adjust the desired precision of track state estimates to meet the operational requirements.