Emesent, an autonomous mapping and robotics company, has been awarded a $2 million grant from the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) program to develop and commercialise Cortex AI, an open, modular autonomy platform that, Emesent says, enables any robotic system or vehicle to navigate, map and operate in challenging and GPS-denied environments.

Underground mines, building interiors, tunnels and contested military environments provide no GPS signal, and building GPS-denied navigation from scratch typically requires five or more years and several millions of dollars in R&D. Emesent’s Cortex AI is being developed to eliminate these barriers, the company says.

The project, valued at a total of $5.1 million and funded by the Australian government, is led by Emesent with support from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and EPE and is focused on delivering sovereign capability, accelerating Australian robotics development and enabling global competitiveness. Combining Emesent’s proven navigation re-architected into modular APIs, QUT’s physical AI for scene understanding and validation through EPE’s field-proven robotics solutions, Cortex AI will:

• Decrease time-to-market for robotics applications: Cortex AI eliminates the need to develop GPS-denied autonomy from scratch. A hardware-agnostic robotics operating system for aerial and ground robots, as well as vehicle automation; the platform will drastically compress integration timelines through layered APIs and SDKs and new, advanced capabilities, Emesent claims;
• Power solutions purpose-built for nuanced use cases: Because Cortex AI handles the hard autonomy and AI foundation, partners can invest in domain-specific capability rather than reinventing the navigation stack. The result is more capable, more fit-for-purpose solutions than, Emesent says, any single vendor building everything alone could deliver; and
• Open Emesent’s autonomy technology to more markets: Pivoting Emesent from single-purpose products to an open platform business model, Cortex AI will enable expansion through partners and OEMs. Every Cortex AI-powered system in the field means more data flowing into Emesent Aura Cloud, Emesent’s all-in-one processing and visualisation platform. This continuously improves spatial intelligence quality and makes the platform more valuable for every client’s deployment.

Dr. Farid Kendoul, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Emesent, said: “Emesent’s vision is to be world leaders in autonomous digitisation of the most challenging and unreachable places on earth. That starts with robots that can navigate and sense autonomously, without GPS, on any platform. Our team estimates that the GPS-denied autonomous mapping and navigation industry will reach $9 billion by 2030. Cortex AI is the engine that makes this scale possible, opening our proven autonomy to OEMs and partners so that more Emesent-powered systems can operate in the field, feeding richer data into Aura Cloud, and closing the loop between the physical world and the digital twin.”

A working prototype of Cortex AI has already been deployed with more than a dozen early adopter organisations across defence, mining and the built environment and integrated into drones, ground robots and heavy vehicles, Emesent claims. Cortex AI is being built on the same SLAM and autonomy technologies already proven in Emesent’s Hovermap and GX1 products.

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