CRC-P round nine projects, $25 million in grant support announced

Industry minister Karen Andrews announced ten collaborative projects on Tuesday, involving a combined 29 companies — of them 22 SMEs — and $25 million in federal support.

According to the business.gov.au website, a three-year project led by Clearbox Systems gained a $3 million grant for a three-year, $13.5 million project to “development of a novel [space domain awareness] sensor and commence implementation of an integrated STM system that will securely store, analyse and distribute collected data for satellite location, identification, tracking and collision avoidance.”

A robot named “Kelpie” will be commercialised through another, supported through a $2.85 million grant, and resulting in a system that can identify and spray weeds. Five of these will be trialled Monaro farms and Treasury Wine Estates vineyards. Project outcomes will include recording the position and size of the weeds, map this for planning and audit purposes, analyse weed data, making this “publicly available as a research resource as a Reference Weeds Library.”

Another of the ten projects — involving Synbiova, CSIRO, Biointelect, Specialised Breeders Australia and Valo Biomedia and supported by a grant of $2.4 million — will scale up egg and cell line production for more productive vaccine output, and “deliver a translated, commercially viable products for international sale.”

A full list of the round’s funded projects can be seen here.

Picture: Clearbox Systems