Distributed Sensor System Innovations

The primary objective of this Phase I SBIR is to develop cost effective distributed sensor systems which will enable the Navy to reduce the total costs of ownership while achieving system performance and reliability goals. The two most significant challenges facing the Navy sensor systems community today are system availability and cost. Current solutions have been very polarized in results in that the cost effective systems have yielded unacceptable availability while higher availability systems are at prohibitive cost levels. Achieving these objectives will require a multifaceted approach that addresses not only the cost of the electronics but adopts scalable simplified system architectures. The approach must develop innovative packaging approaches, facilitate improved sensor manufacturing processes, utilize new sensor technologies that are more cost effectively scaled to higher performance applications, and transition to higher levels of component integration. Extending this capability across multiple sensor systems and the synchronous data fusion of either homogeneous and/or heterogeneous sets of sensors will enable Future Naval Capabilities to realize multi-sensor system processing and provide greatly enhanced detection capabilities while attaining system availability and cost goals.