SBIR Phase I: INNOVATIVE RADIATION AWARENESS FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT AND FIRST RESPONDERS

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes protection of municipal-level first responders and local communities from radiological hazards through affordable continuous wide-area radiation monitoring (RM). Radiological threats range from the ultimate high-consequence-rare-event posed by radiological dispersal devices and stolen or unaccounted for special nuclear material to more common and routine radiological events triggered by radiological sources from construction, power, medicine, and industry. Regardless of the threat, current radiological equipment and training is inadequate, and first responders are ill-equipped to deal with radiological incidents that occur in urban environments. Due to technology and training costs, comprehensive radiation surveillance systems can be adopted by only the largest and wealthiest cities, leaving most municipalities and local first responders unprotected. The project will develop an RM system that is easily deployed, alerts to spectral anomalies as well as radiation levels, requires no specialized training for front-line operators, and is vastly more cost effective than existing systems. This RM system can be deployed in a variety of complex environments regardless of size or density. The end result is accurate, real-time mapping of large geographical areas that can be used to detect, analyze, and interpret radiation levels in a variety of environments. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project provides innovative approaches in building a spatial-temporal-spectral database of gamma radiation to monitor change detection over large urban areas. The concept is to improve general radiation awareness as well as source detection capability by having continuous monitoring. Rather than attempting to identify specific isotopes in spectral observations ? which is difficult at long distances and requires highly sensitive detectors ? it is possible to detect temporal anomalies in spectral shape by keeping a database of past observations. This provides for profound increases in detection distance or likewise, in faint source detection. For successful commercialization of the RM system, innovative research is needed in two main areas: 1) universal multi-sensor integration through boot-strapped autocalibration and integrated continuous health monitoring, which this proposal will address via field deployment of multiple sensors to characterize with novel sensor-to-sensor fusion methodologies; and 2) municipal infrastructure optimization that will permit surveys to be conducted in a distributed fashion without dedicated survey vehicles, which this proposal will address by collecting data and building operational research optimization models for key aspects of the mobile sensor deployment concept, answering critical questions on the economic viability of the approach. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.