Two Six Labs using Internet of Things (IoT) technology to prevent terrorists from placing atomic bombs
ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are turning to sensor data analysts at Two Six Labs LLC in Arlington, Va., to capitalize on Internet of Things (IoT) technology to help prevent terrorists from placing and detonating atomic bombs in or around the nation's large metropolitan areas.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., announced a $13.2 million contract to Two Six Labs on Thursday for the SIGMA project.
The company will help DARPA apply IoT technologies to potential networks of thousands of low-cost radiation sensors linked throughout U.S. cities by WiFi and cellular phone systems to a cloud-based network backbone.
DARPA and the agency's industry partners have been working on the SIGMA system for the past several years. It consists of small and large mobile and static radiation sensors to support agile deployment.
The project also seeks to develop the network infrastructure to connect as many as 10,000 of these small radiation-detection sensors, as well as a cloud-computing infrastructure to analyze streaming spectroscopic data automatically from these sensors in real-time. Then the project seeks to store many billions of these spectra for spatiotemporal and forensic analyses in an easily retrievable manner.
This part of the SIGMA program focuses on data storage, ingestion, and networking; and component capabilities to detect weapons of mass destruction using low-cost, high-capability radiation sensors, automated detection algorithms, and real-time alerts of potential nuclear terror threats.
DARPA experts are interested in new software and network infrastructure that can ingest, analyze, and store data for thousands of spectroscopic sensors connected with bidirectional communications and sensor fusion algorithms that run in real-time with minimal latency.
This sensor network should be able to manage inventory and device status; display device status, sensor output, and location in real-time; query recent historical data; store several years of sensor data; simulate thousands of sensors to replay historical sensor data; carry out security and encryption; and deploy on several commercial cloud infrastructures.
On this contract Two Six Labs will do the work in Arlington and Falls Church, Va.; Bowie, Md.; and Andover, Mass., and should be finished by March 2020.
For more information contact Two Six Labs online at www.twosixlabs.com, or DARPA at www.darpa.mil.
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John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
