AVISA Data Fusion

AVISA Data Fusion is a sensor-fusion middleware developed by Microflown AVISA, the Arnhem-based defence firm best known for its acoustic vector sensors. Introduced around 2018, the software binds together feeds from disparate sensor types — acoustic, radio-frequency, radar, and electro-optical — and resolves them into a single track picture for operators of ground-based air-defence and force-protection systems. It sits behind the counter-drone and hostile-fire detection kits Microflown supplies to NATO ground forces rather than being a standalone product a customer would buy in isolation.

The layer’s distinguishing input is Microflown’s own acoustic vector sensor technology, a MEMS-based transducer that measures particle velocity rather than pressure and therefore returns a bearing to a sound source from a single sensor rather than from a distributed microphone array. In the counter-UAS role this yields a passive detection channel that keeps working when radar returns are lost in ground clutter or when RF direction finders find nothing because the drone is flying a preset waypoint mission and stops emitting. The fusion engine correlates those acoustic bearings with radar tracks and RF cuts, hands the composite to the electro-optical turret for classification, and passes confirmed tracks into a NATO STANAG-compliant command-and-control feed. The company describes the architecture as open, meaning third-party sensors and effectors can be plugged in rather than swapped for its own.

Publicly named operators are the Netherlands and Germany, both of which have been consumers of Microflown’s acoustic detection kit for years — the Dutch armed forces in a long-running procurement relationship and the Bundeswehr through the base-protection systems Microflown supplies alongside larger integrators. Deployment counts and contract values have not been disclosed. The system has not been advertised as combat-tested and does not appear in the field reporting from Ukraine or the Middle East.

Its niche is the passive, low-emission end of counter-drone command-and-control, where the Microflown angle — acoustic detection working when other sensors do not — is the reason the fusion layer exists at all. It sits at a different point on the spectrum from the counter-UAS C2 stacks offered by larger European integrators such as Rheinmetall and Hensoldt, and represents the kind of quiet middleware product that European air-defence architectures increasingly need as small drones become a routine threat close behind the front line.