Bio-MAV Development

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to develop an unmanned aircraft system based bioaerosol detection capability that is cued to a region of interest using non-specific, persistent and wide area thermal imagers commonly deployed for surveillance.The detection capability, referred to as Bio-MAV, will fold into a recursive Bayesian classifier (RBC) processing module currently being developed by PSI to detect and track bioaerosol plumes using widely installed thermal imagers.Bio-MAV will be integrated to PSIs InstantEye (IE) as two modules: Mod 1 comprised of a Gen 3 IE with an on-board thermal imager used to observe, locate, and bound an aerosol plume, and Mod 2 comprised of a Gen 4 IE with a repackaged commercial off the shelf biological point detector to provide confirmation whether the thermal object identified by the RBC is a biological agent containing aerosol.The projected detection limit is 50,000 ACPLA with 80% probability with a 2 minute time to detect.Data streams from the two Bio-MAV sensors will be folded into the RBCs framework to provide wide area, persistent, high confidence bioaerosol threat early warning.Bio-MAV will be developed and will undergo multiple open release field tests under the proposed effort.