Monitoring and Inspecting Dirty Nukes Including Generating Heatmaps of Terrain (MIDNIGHT)

A successful weapon of mass destruction (WMD) terrorist attack against the United States would have a profound and potentially catastrophic impact on our nation. It is imperative to be able to quickly, efficiently, and effectively localize radiological threats in a wide array of unstructured environments to detect and deter such an event. In recent years, man-portable radiation detectors have become smaller and more capable. At the same time, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have become much cheaper, more reliable, and more sophisticated. UAS play a critical and growing role in government, military, commercial, and scientific operations across a range of missions. Their versatility, maneuverability, and dependability, coupled with their ability to keep operators out of harm's way, make them critical assets in a wide range of domains. Charles River Analytics proposes to develop a concept design, perform feasibility assessments, and develop a prototype system for Monitoring and Inspecting Dirty Nukes Including Generating Heat maps of Terrain (MIDNIGHT). MIDNIGHT is an end-to-end system for conducting surveys for radiological threats using a coordinated team of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). MIDNIGHT enables multiple UAS to safely and effectively conduct semi-autonomous searches in complex, real-world environments.