Organic Airspace Monitoring System for Aerial Wildfire Response Operations

KalScott Engineering is developing miniature electronic position reporting systems for unmanned air vehicles. These conform to FAA's the RemoteID and ADS-B standards, while also being interoperable with IoT standards. Using the ADS-B standard, vehicles or personnel carrying these devices can be "seen" by ADS-B equipped aircraft. The position can also be reported via the RemoteID standard using wifi and bluetooth, and LTE, and received on other airborne or ground vehicles or ground nodes. In this SBIR project, we propose to develop and demonstrate the technology to support wildfire management operations, where manned and unmanned ground and aerial vehicles and personnel are involved in a highly dynamic and challenging environment. In Phase I, we will refine the technical requirements in conjunction with NASA and first responder personnel, make the necessary adaptations to our hardware, and rapidly demo a proof-of-concept solution. In Phase II, the hardware and software solution will be refined, along with the network elements. Our firm already has commitments from a third party investor already for cost matching for Phase II-E, CCRPP and any post-SBIR commercialization (letter included).

Potential use in NASA initiatives for wildfire management missions: this system can be rapidly developed for testing in NASA initiatives for wildfire management missions. The devices can be demo'ed at a proof-of-concept level in Phase I, followed by field testing in Phase II. The devices can also be used for real-time vehicle tracking for flight tests involving UAVs, which NASA conducts routinely, both at NASA installations, and elsewhere. These devices can also be used for the emerging eVTOL (UAM) air taxi industry.

We are working with DoD and FAA to demo these devices for UAV operations in government and civilian airspaces. We are working with a regional energy utility to demo these in energy infrastructure inspections in 2022 under on-going NASA SBIR Phase II-E. The data from these devices is interoperable with emerging IoT networks, enabling coordination between manned and unmanned ground and air vehicles.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.