By LESLIE EIKLEBERRY
Salina Post
A competition ultimately devoted to improving first responders' situational awareness in emergency situations drew nine teams to the K-State Salina campus this week.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) UAS Indoor Challenge First Responder prize competition includes university and business teams from across the country that have been developing indoor uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) that offer improved usability and situational awareness while operating with a limited or no GPS signal. An additional component was to develop such a platform that has a lower cost that would be more affordable for first responder agencies, especially those in rural areas that might not have a great deal of funding to devote to such equipment.
The challenge has been a multi-level competition that began when proposals for the UAS platforms were submitted on April 27, 2022. Throughout the various stages, the field of competition was narrowed until it got to the nine teams who have been competing Monday-Wednesday at K-State Salina for a $100,000 grand prize. The first five teams will walk away with some prize money. There also are up to six Best-in-Class monetary awards.
Terese Manley, of the NIST Communications Technology Laboratory, explained that NIST is a science standards and metrology laboratory.
"A lot of the work that we are doing is the research for helping first responders with their improved situational awareness," she said.
Not only do NIST personnel look at first responders' network communications, such as cellular, WiFi, and broadband, but they also look at improving situational awareness with drone video and photography technology.
"We're experimenting with the drones being capable of providing the incident commander those extra eyeballs on the other side of a building or, in the case of what we're doing here today, it's more of the indoor situational awareness," Manley said.
"So you could imagine law enforcement or FBI going to the scene of a crime, wanting to be able to not send in their own personnel for fear of loss of life. They can send in a drone to go in and see if there are any bad actors. They could go in and find people who have been injured in a search and rescue operation, or, in the case of a tornado or earthquake," she said. "In this scenario, there is a lot of debris and the building has changed. It is more of a constrained environment. So we're looking at small drones that have all these capabilities, the camera technology, thermal technology for finding people, being able to operate in low light in a non-GPS environment, and being there to help first responders have that situational awareness."
While drones became more commercially available approximately 10 years ago, drone use by first responders has only come about in the past six to seven years, Manley said.
"A lot has changed with the technology of drones since that time. And the uncrewed aircraft systems, they are using them as a tool more and more every day," she said.
The drones are a delicate balance of size/weight and technology. The drones have to be able to provide useful technology for first responders while being able to fly into small spaces and fly for extended periods of time.
"Of course, they (first responders) can't use the drone that your grandchild is getting under the Christmas tree in their operation, so we are working with teams here this week who are retrofitting or building from scratch drones that can support the mission, more ruggedized and with these additional features and capabilities," Manley said.
The drones in the competition are all under 10 pounds.
"When you have a lightweight or small drone like that, you can only carry so much weight, so there are design tradeoffs that all of the teams have to consider. If they add an additional camera or they add an additional microphone or audio sensor, if they add more weight, then their flight time goes down, so they are constantly balancing those design tradeoffs in their engineering because they want the longest flight time," she said.
According to Manley, the mix of teams is about half university students and half small businesses. She explained that while the businesses might currently be UAS manufacturers, they may not be focused on public safety and the needs of first responders. NIST also provides an educational component for those businesses concerning the needs of first responders.