US$38.5m for public safety comms research

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded US$38.5 million to 33 R&D projects aimed at advancing broadband communications technologies for first responders.

“These grant awards will help fulfil our mission, ensuring that first responders have access to advanced tools that can save lives,” said Department of Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross.

The multiyear grants are intended to help modernise public safety communications and operations by supporting the migration of data, video and voice communications from mobile radio to a nationwide public safety broadband network, as well as accelerating critical technologies related to indoor location tracking and public safety analytics.

The grants are part of the Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program funded by NIST’s US$300 million allocation from the 2015 auction of advanced wireless service licenses.

The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 provided the funding so that NIST could conduct an R&D program to help public safety overcome critical technical barriers, spur innovation as well as investment in public safety broadband, and realise the full potential of wireless broadband capabilities.

NIST reviewed 162 proposals from a diverse pool of national and international applicants across industry, academia and public safety organisations.

The 33 selected projects span five key technology areas that have the potential to greatly enhance public safety communications and operations:

• Mission-critical voice
• Location-based services
• Public safety analytics
• Research and prototyping platforms
• Resilient systems.

The awardees and their projects are:

• Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) — US$782,280 — An Infrastructure-Free Localization System for Firefighters
• Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) — US$642,039 — Hyper-Reality Helmet for Mapping and Visualizing Public Safety Data
• Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) — US$1,800,000 — Real-Time Video Analytics for Situation Awareness
• Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) — US$1,241,825 — Towards an Emergency Edge Supercloud
• George Washington University (Washington, DC) — US$700,000 — Coverage, Capacity, and Resilience Enhancement in Limited PSN
• Harris Corporation (Melbourne, Florida) — US$200,464 — ProSe
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) — US$799,000 — Situational Awareness for Emergencies Through Network-Enabled Technologies (SafeT-Net)
• Michigan Technological University (Houghton, Michigan) — US$1,007,049 — Resilient System Solutions for Data Sharing for Wildland Fire Incident Operations
• Misram, doing business as Spectronn (Holmdel, New Jersey) — US$649,984 — Heterogeneous Fog Communications and Computing for Resilience
• New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (Trenton, New Jersey) — US$1,701,657 — Fiscal Year 2017 Public Safety Innovation Acceleration Program
• New York University (New York, New York) — US$2,265,051 — End-to-End Research Platform for Public Safety Millimeter Wave Communications
• Prominent Edge (Nokesville, Virginia) — US$500,218 — StatEngine: A Real-Time Open Source Data Analytics and Visualization Platform for Public Safety
• Software Radio Systems (Cork, Ireland) — US$1,453,100 — OpenFirst
• Sonim Technologies (San Mateo, California) — US$1,398,950 — End-to-End Mission Critical Push to Talk with Direct Mode Operation
• Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas) — US$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) — US$1,800,000 — DistressNet-NG: Resilient Mobile Broadband Communication and Edge Computing for FirstNet
• TRX Systems (Greenbelt, Maryland) — US$1,414,605 — TRX First Responder Location and Mapping Services
• Universidad del Pais Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Leioa, Spain) — US$1,259,143 — Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP)
• University of California – Irvine (Irvine, California) — US$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) — US$1,223,527 — Modeling and Development of Resilient Communication for First Responders in Disaster Management
• University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio) — US$398,869 — First Responder Indoor Location Using LTE Direct Mode Operations
• University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio) — US$500,364 — Information-Driven Video Communication for Public Safety Networks
• University of Colorado (Boulder, Colorado) — US$1,502,796 — SDR LTE Network Testbed and RESPONS
• University of Houston (Houston, Texas) — US$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) — US$688,938 — Body-Worn Camera Analytics (BOCA) in Public Safety
• University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan) — US$997,873 — Decimeter Accurate, Long Range Non-Line-of-Sight RF Localization Solution for Public Safety Applications
• University of Oxford (Oxford, United Kingdom) — US$1,182,904 — Pervasive, Accurate and Reliable Location Based Services for Emergency Responders
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California) — US$449,101 — Propagation Channel Models and System Performance for Device-to-Device Communications for Public Safety Applications
• University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia) — US$1,119,854 — Towards Cognitive Assistant Systems for Emergency Response
• University of Washington (Seattle, Washington) — US$1,000,000 — Modeling, Simulation and Performance Evaluation for Future Public Safety Networks
• Vencore Labs, doing business as Applied Communications Science (Basking Ridge, New Jersey) — US$1,962,779 — Device-to-Device System for Public Safety (DDPS)
• Voxel51 (Ann Arbor, Michigan) — US$1,241,189 — ETA: Extensible Tools for Analytics in Public Safety
• Western Fire Chiefs Association (Wilsonville, Oregon) — US$1,741,548 — Creation of a Unified Analysis Framework and the Data Comparison Center.

Image courtesy FirstNet.

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