The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) branch and key research partners are seeking innovators for prototyping, testing and transitioning leading technologies for emergency responders as part of a smart cities effort that began last fall.
The Request for Innovators (RFI) seeks new capabilities in three areas, including autonomous navigation for indoor drones to support search and rescue missions in challenging environments such as fire or earthquake damaged structures, indoor building sensor suites such as digital image, video, thermal or Wi-Fi finder, and body-worn platforms that integrate a personal area network with third-party sensor packages.
DHS says “The goal is to put tools with smart city and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities into the hands of first responders by 2020.”
Under the indoor drone technology area, the RFI is also interested in separate prototypes for hand-carried or drone-mounted sensors, including a WiFinder for smartphone signals and a thermal sensor for detecting the heat signatures of people or other living creatures.
Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology, which won a $4.8 million contract from S&T last September to apply IoT technologies to first responders in the commercial marketplace, is one of DHS’s three partners on the new effort. The others are Smart City Works, a business accelerator based in Washington, D.C., and TechNexus, a Chicago-based venture collaborator.
Initial responses are due by Jan. 18 and invited responses are due by Feb. 15 with final selections announced in March. Selectees will receive $50,000 for an initial prototype. Awardees selected for second validation prototype will receive $100,000 over 18 months.
At the end of the second prototype the partners hope to have “commercially-relevant capabilities” that can be used in initial field testing with responders.
For additional information, see: http://www.cit.org/sciti.