NIST’s PSCR funds 33 public safety communications research projects
Augmented reality helmets. Resilient fog computing. Mission-critical push-to-talk with direct device-to-device communication. Real-time video analytics. Precise and pervasive location-based services. These are just a few of the 33 projects that were awarded $38.5 million in funding by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Public Safety Communications Research Division in its first round of grants to spur innovation in public safety communications.
The Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program’s first round ofwas announced in January. It is funded out of $300 million that NIST received as part of the 2015 AWS spectrum auction, to support public safety communications, including the First Responders Network Authority nationwide LTE network that will be built out by AT&T.
Dereck Orr, division chief for PSCR and acting director of the NIST Communications Technology Laboratory, told RCR Wireless News for a recent special report on public safety communications that PSCR received more than 160 applications for the first round of grants.
“It just shows that there is a lot of interest in being part of addressing public safety for next generation broadband,” Orr said. He added that while PSCR received applications around technology in a range of public safety areas, most of the proposals revolved around mission-critical voice, location-based services and data analytics for public safety. Having access to a local Band 14 network at the FirstNet Lab in Boulder, Colo. will allow PSCR to test LTE functionalities and new applications on a live network, Orr said, and potentially provide access to other public safety researchers as well.
According to NIST, the grants went to a wide range of academic researchers, governmental organizations and private companies. The awards ranged in size from about $200,000 to about $2.2 million for individual projects. The largest single grant was to New York University, for an end-to-end research platform to explore the use of millimeter wave in public safety communications. Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania had the most projects funded, receiving three awards totaling about $3.2 million to develop a “hyper-reality helmet for mapping and visualizing public safety data” as well as infrastructure-free localization for firefighters and real-time video analytics for situational awareness.
NIST’s full list of awardees includes:
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – $782,280
An Infrastructure-Free Localization System for Firefighters
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – $642,039
Hyper-Reality Helmet for Mapping and Visualizing Public Safety Data
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – $1,800,000
Real-Time Video Analytics for Situation Awareness
Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) – $1,241,825
Towards an Emergency Edge Supercloud
George Washington University (Washington, D.C.) – $700,000
Coverage, Capacity, and Resilience Enhancement in Limited PSN
Harris Corporation (Melbourne, Florida) – $200,464
ProSe
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) – $799,000
Situational Awareness for Emergencies Through Network-Enabled Technologies (SafeT-Net)
Michigan Technological University (Houghton, Michigan) – $1,007,049
Resilient System Solutions for Data Sharing for Wildland Fire Incident Operations
Misram LLC, doing business as Spectronn (Holmdel, New Jersey) – $649,984
Heterogeneous Fog Communications and Computing for Resilience
New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (Trenton, New Jersey) – $1,701,657
Fiscal Year 2017 Public Safety Innovation Acceleration Program
New York University (New York, New York) – $2,265,051
End-to-End Research Platform for Public Safety Millimeter Wave Communications
Prominent Edge LLC (Nokesville, Virginia) – $500,218
StatEngine: A Real-Time Open Source Data Analytics and Visualization Platform for Public Safety
Software Radio Systems Limited (Cork, Ireland) – $1,453,100
OpenFirst
Sonim Technologies, Inc. (San Mateo, California) – $1,398,950
End-to-End Mission Critical Push to Talk with Direct Mode Operation
Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas) – $1,343,952
SAFE-NET: An Integrated Connected Vehicle and Computing Platform for Public Safety Applications
Texas A&M Engineering Experiments Station (College Station, Texas) – $1,800,000
DistressNet-NG: Resilient Mobile Broadband Communication and Edge Computing for FirstNet
TRX Systems, Inc. (Greenbelt, Maryland) – $1,414,605
TRX First Responder Location and Mapping Services
Universidad del Pais Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Leioa, Spain) – $1,259,143
Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP)
University of California – Irvine (Irvine, California) – $1,960,613
Ultimate Navigation Chip (uNavChip): Chip-Scale Personal Navigation System Integrating Deterministic Localization and Probabilistic Signals of Opportunity
University of California – Riverside (Riverside, California) – $1,223,527
Modeling and Development of Resilient Communication for First Responders in Disaster Management
University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio) – $398,869
First Responder Indoor Location Using LTE Direct Mode Operations
University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio) – $500,364
Information-Driven Video Communication for Public Safety Networks
University of Colorado (Boulder, Colorado) – $1,502,796
SDR LTE Network Testbed and RESPONS
University of Houston (Houston, Texas) – $1,577,626
Multi-tiered Video Analytics for Abnormality Detection and Alerting to Improve Response Time for First Responder Communications and Operations
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan) – $688,938
Body-Worn Camera Analytics (BOCA) in Public Safety
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan) – $997,873
Decimeter Accurate, Long Range Non-Line-of-Sight RF Localization Solution for Public Safety Applications
University of Oxford (Oxford, United Kingdom) – $1,182,904
Pervasive, Accurate and Reliable Location Based Services for Emergency Responders
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California) – $449,101
Propagation Channel Models and System Performance for Device-to-Device Communications for Public Safety Applications
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia) – $1,119,854
Towards Cognitive Assistant Systems for Emergency Response
University of Washington (Seattle, Washington) – $1,000,000
Modeling, Simulation and Performance Evaluation for Future Public Safety Networks
Vencore Labs, Inc., doing business as Applied Communications Science (Basking Ridge, New Jersey) – $1,962,779
Device-to-Device System for Public Safety (DDPS)
Voxel51 LLC (Ann Arbor, Michigan) – $1,241,189
ETA: Extensible Tools for Analytics in Public Safety
Western Fire Chiefs Association, Inc. (Wilsonville, Oregon) – $1,741,548
Creation of a Unified Analysis Framework and the Data Comparison Center
For more information on public safety communications, download RCR Wireless News’ special report on public safety LTE.
Image copyright: antonprado / 123RF Stock Photo
