PHYSICAL SCIENCES INC. — Department of Homeland Security SBIR Phase I: H-SB019.1-010

Description

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to develop the Networked Aerial Vehicle for Automated Radiation Clearing (NAVARC) to perform an autonomous search for radiological threats in a complex 3-D environment. The PSI-developed InstantEye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will navigate using a series of optimized waypoints to minimize the time required to fully search an area and inspect objects. Detection and identification of threats is provided using the Poisson Clutter Split (PCS) algorithm operating on 1 Hz spectra acquired by a commercially available Kromek D3S detector integrated with the UAV. The integration of the COTS Kromek D3S detector and the PCS algorithm offers long range detection and identification of bare and shielded sources. The D3S+PCS solution yields a lower limit of detection that exceeds the requirements of ANSI N42.48 by a factor of 10x, making NAVARC well suited for inspection of low-activity threats that may be concealed inside cargo containers, cars, and other shielding objects. Localization of threats is achieved by fusing radiological data with the on-board UAV sensors, such as inertial measurement units (IMU) and GPS. Wireless communication between the UAV and a base station will leverage an extensible and scalable Thrift framework, modeled on the open-architecture interface control document (ICD) associated with the CWMD Wearable Intelligent Nuclear Detection (WIND) program. The base station will export N42.42 investigation reports for integration to other network systems (e.g. MFK/TAK/SIGMA). The use of scalable networks (SIGMA) provides a pathway for multiple UAVs to simultaneously report data, and to aggregate alerts in a single environment.