A fibre optic coupler is a fiberised component used as an essential building block in a fibre-based optical system such as a fibre laser, fibre resonator, fibre interferometer or fibre communication network. However, a conventional fibre coupler is composed of two solid fibres thermally fused side by side. Hence, its performance is limited by a solid core. The institute has developed a hollow/air core fibre coupler that is based on anti-resonant fibre technology with two air cores in the coupler behaving as an individual anti-resonant fibre core.

There is soaring interest and investment in unmanned platforms—drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), robots, and other mission- and business-critical applications—but challenges remain. These unmanned platforms require live, uninterrupted wireless video streaming with wide bandwidth and low latencies, and dedicated spectrum channels.

Millions of dollars are spent yearly to refrigerate cold drinks, which are eventually consumed at less than ideal temperatures, wasting the energy used to maintain the drink at a reasonably cold temperature. This problem intensifies in tropical countries due to the high demand for chilled drinks throughout the year. This cooling technology's vision is for the drink to be cooled only moments before consumption, thus saving the energy necessary to keep it cold for long periods.

The global inspection industry is trending towards the unmanned system, for example, Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), which are mostly teleoperated by a human operator. However, a skilled human pilot is an expensive asset and also in limited supply.