Date: Jan 15, 2010 Source: ARMY SBIR Success Story (
click here to go to the source)
Persistent Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) are a key requirement for commanders. This requires significant improvements to data and information flow from remote and denied areas over a period of time without the need for frequent servicing or power supply replenishment. Commercially, there is also a growing need to effectively manage and monitor vast amounts of land and surrounding environments with minimal dependence on local infrastructure. Argon ST's SensorBone was developed to directly respond to these requirements.
SensorBone is a self-organizing, energy-efficient, scalable, rapidly deployable, and secure wireless backbone system that enables real-time environment and event monitoring with thousands of heterogeneous sensors deployed over a large remote area. SensorBone is the first system of its kind to meet challenging requirements that have often been seen as conflicting: long-range communication, low energy, and fast detection relay, ease of deployment and management, and low cost. SensorBone drastically improves the effectiveness and capabilities of persistent ground.
ISR operations with low-cost unattended sensors in hostile and environmentally challenging areas, a critical need for both future asymmetric warfare and wide-area land management with environmental monitoring. SensorBone allows critical sensor data to be relayed to monitoring centers in near real time without requiring human input.
As a result, rapid response to situations observed from accurate and up-to-date data can be performed without putting Soldiers in harm's way. SensorBone is an ideal solution for extended sensor network operations in remote and hostile environments such as the battlefield, military training ranges, and national/ state parks, and also for border security and high-risk infrastructure protection.
Phase III Impacts
The Office of Naval Research and a DOD agency awarded Argon ST $2.1M in supplemental research and development contracts over the last three years to adapt SensorBone core technologies for unattended ground ISR and tagging, tracking, and locating applications. In addition, SensorBone received $480K from the U.S. Army's Commercialization Pilot Program. Argon ST is currently engaged with DoD to develop a transition plan to enable SensorBone nodes to be deployed as early as FY2011.
