Sports Technology

The commercialisation of CSIRO research reached an important milestone last week with Melbourne-based Catapult Sports licensing tracking and positioning technology developed by the Federal Government science agency.

Catapult Sports will now integrate the Wireless Ad-hoc System for Positioning (WASP) tracking and positioning technology developed by CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) into their athlete monitoring system to create ClearSky, a new product to enable highly accurate tracking of athlete’s positions and movements in indoor and covered arena sports applications, an application previously unavailable using existing technologies.

Commenting on how the agency was helping build Australian businesses and boost the country’s productivity, CSIRO Director of Business Development and Commercial Jan Bingley stated “Catapult Sports already have some of the world’s best sports teams using their devices, including almost all English Premier League teams, NRL, AFL, American football and basketball and international hockey, rowing and sailing teams.”

WASP has also been licensed by mining communication company Minetec and incorporated into their Trax+Tags II product for greatly enhancing mining safety in underground, poor visibility environments by keeping miners clear of heavy vehicles and dangerous areas.

WASP can track people and objects to an accuracy of up to a few centimetres, a great improvement on conventional methods such as GPS and WiFi-based tracking, which in underground environments are either inaccurate or don’t work at all.

CSIRO has now created more than 150 companies and currently hold interests in around 30. It is also Australia’s largest patent portfolio and issues around 80 licenses each year, many to Australian businesses.

Bingley added “CSIRO works with about 3000 clients each year, including more than 20 per cent of the Australian Stock Exchange top 200 companies and 1300 Small to Medium Enterprises.

“CSIRO also has significant partnerships and alliances with domestic and global private sector organisations, including Orica, Cotton Seed Distributors, Boeing and General Electric.

“Our aim is to play an important role in providing Australian industry with access to leading capabilities and technologies that help to improve the productivity or competitiveness of Australia.”

CSIRO has now created more than 150 companies and currently hold interests in around 30. It is also Australia’s largest patent portfolio and issues around 80 licenses each year, many to Australian businesses.

Last week CSIRO also licensed technology to the food processing and surveying industries.

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