The Naval Air Systems Command has awarded SRI International a five-year, $36.5 million contract to develop, demonstrate and test advanced sensing and situational awareness technologies and systems to improve port security in the U.S.
The work will be carried out by SRI’s National Center for Maritime and Port Security (NCMPS), which was established earlier this year in St. Petersburg, Fla., which is taking a comprehensive approach to maritime and port security by exploring technology, systems integration, testing and evaluation, domestic and international policy, and training. SRI is an independent, non-profit research and development organization.
The funding under the contract will be evenly distributed over the five year period. Subcontractors to SRI include: Science Applications International Corp. [SAI], which is helping with radar systems; STS International, which provides expertise on land side security and integration; SRI’s Sarnoff Corp. subsidiary, which develops software for automated security systems and biometrics; Concurrent Technologies Corp., which provides expertise for autonomous aircraft that could help better understand the airspace security element to port security; the shipbuilding company Navatek, Inc., which is interested in designing and building small craft for port security; Alaka’i Consulting & Engineering, Inc., for improvised explosive device detection through Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy; TechProjects, which sets up control and data fusion centers; the University of South Florida’s (USF) College of Marine Science, which is helping in some technology development; and both USF and St. Petersburg College’s National Terrorism Preparedness Institute, which are both involved in training and education.
Initially under the award the NCMPS will be doing a needs analysis, prototype data fusion systems, software development and others, Larry Langebrake, the director of the Marine Technology Program at NCMPS, tells TR2.
The needs analysis will build on threat analyses the Coast Guard has done for all active ports in the U.S. “We hope to take the existing threat analysis data for all the ports, and start to apply some intelligence to what the risks are in each port and start the evaluation process and what it’s going to take to have a comprehensive system that has core components that can be applied in each of the ports,” Langebrake says. The Port of Tampa Bay, Fla., will be the first venue for a needs analysis but that will quickly expand to other ports in the country, he says.
Noting that each port is unique, work under the contract will focus on the common solutions that can be brought to bear across all ports as well as how best to address to mitigate the risks at individual ports, Langebrake adds.
In the second phase of work NCMPS will build a test bed system to demonstrate technologies that can address the threats and risk, Langebrake says. “That test bed includes opportunities to develop technology but primarily also to evaluate existing commercial off the shelf technology,” he says. “We will be a trusted agent to port authorities and other government agencies and even cargo and carrier line operators because they need to know what technologies to trust and which technologies will provide data against standards that can be used across the board.”
Helping to develop policies and standards will be one of the critical missions of the NCMPS that is beyond the work of the Navy contract. Langebrake says that port directors and other officials that have security responsibilities at a port, such as a local sheriff’s office, get approached by technology vendors “but don’t have the technical expertise to evaluate” a particular system or device against a vendor’s claims. Moreover, those technologies aren’t being evaluated against accepted standards, he adds.
“So we’re in very serious need of tightening that up and putting some standards on it,” Langebrake says.
Through its various work Langebrake and his colleagues hope to turn the NCMPS into a national asset for maritime and port security, he says.
Hopefully within five years under the contract the NCMPS hopes to take the prototype technologies and others that are tested to put together a comprehensive Maritime Domain Awareness System (MDAS), Langebrake says. MDAS will use technologies developed for underwater sensing and surveillance, surface surveillance, port airspace surveillance, to be integrated into an automated system that will determine what the threats are produce an alarm for someone to decide on what action needs to be taken, he says. Longer term, say within 10 years the center is hoping to threat analysis automated to the point of being able to suggest a course of action, he adds.
One of the underwater sensing technologies the NCMPS will be working with in the first year is the Mobile Inspection Package (MIPS), which was developed by USF and SRI. The technology already been pilot tested by the Coast Guard. MIPS can be integrated onto an autonomous or remote underwater vehicle and is used to map and monitor below the water’s surface and on the sea floor. MIPS can provide three dimensional images of objects and the data it provides can be geographically referenced from previous data collections to monitor for changes in a location, Langebrake says.
An initial version of MIPS has already been commercialized by CodaOctopus, an underwater solutions provider. SRI is currently developing a next-generation version of the sensing technology that will have better resolution, Langebrake says.