xTechSearch: Army Picks Top 10 Tech Innovators

WASHINGTON: Miniaturized electromechanical compasses so you can still find your way when the enemy’s jammed GPS. 360 degree cameras you can throw into a building before you storm it. 60-minute screening for pathogens like COVID-19. Those are just three of the winning ideas in the latest round of the Army’s Expeditionary Technology Search program, the service’s push to get high tech out of small biz.

This week, 20 small businesses made their pitches to a panel of Army judges — and in a suitably 21^st century touch, it was all done via the web, since the AUSA Huntsville conference where the pitches were originally to take place was canceled because of the coronavirus. (Click here for all our virtual and surrogate AUSA coverage).

Yesterday, in a brief webcast, xTechSearch program manager Zeke Topolosky read out the 10 semifinal winners, who’ll receive $120,000 each and – even more important for many of the competitors – access to Army expert mentors to help refine their pitch and their product for military use. One final winner will be picked to receive $250,000 this fall, hopefully at AUSA’s grand annual meeting in October if the coronavirus permits.

Topolosky spoke to me at length by phone after the announcement. What follows, in his own words (edited for brevity and clarity), is what excited the Army about each of the 10 winners.

Zeke Topolosky, Program Manager, Army xTechSearch: 

It’s 20 semifinalists that presented the last two days. This is a selection of all of the top technologies from all of the different technology areas. All that is evaluated by 28 judges over the past two days, from all different fields, very senior technical experts, acquisition experts, end users, and soldiers. We had to come to a consensus agreement on the ten that would move on to the finals.

Bounce Imaging, they’ve made a tactical throwable camera, but it’s not just throwable. It can be used mounted on a canine, on a person, on a vehicle, and it gives you a complete 360 degree spherical view. They’re working on this in both color and IR [infrared]. And they were working on continuing to miniaturize that technology.

And it stabilizes at all times. Imagine a body-worn camera [on someone] running through a building: You can’t really follow that video. This device kept the video always oriented in one direction that the users requested, and stabilized, at all times. So it really had a lot of immediate use in things like breaching buildings, subterranean investigation, where they could just toss this into a building and get complete 360 degree situational awareness, day and night. 

GeneCapture, a very strong company, lots of amazing expertise on their staff. Obviously, they made some references to coronavirus [testing]. What they can do is detect infections and pathogens from a deployable, portable system, and do it rapidly. They have the ability to test for multiple things at once. Most detection systems like this, they’re testing for one pathogen at a time, and it has to be done in a laboratory. They were pitching the ability to do this downrange, and to test for multiple things.

When you have a soldier downrange, not in a hospital or in a medical station, who may have some illness, you have to sort of guess on treating them, or not treat them at all till they get proper testing, which could lead to administering the wrong medication, or no medication. This would allow a field medic to do those tests, real time, and know exactly what they’re dealing with.

Inductive Ventures. This is a magnetic braking technology. Now, this company pitched numerous use cases for magnetic brakes versus the carbon brakes that we normally use, but for the xTech competition, they focused on braking for helicopters.

Right now, when you land a helicopter, you have no way of moving that machine without either turning on the engine or towing by other vehicles. With this technology, you would enable helicopter operators, if they were to land in an emergency, or have to move their vehicle without it fully functioning, they can do that with this magnetic braking.

We did have several helicopter pilots in our judging panel who were saying, “This is revolutionary for us.” We even had an example of somebody having to do an emergency landing on a soccer field with a Huey overseas, due to mechanical failure. And then once they landed, they literally had no way of moving that helicopter. They left it. This would have enabled them to be able to move it around and work on it.

IoT/AI, these guys kind of blew the socks off the judges. Essentially, they had a device that was hardened against cyber attacks and other interference. They’re also able to do all this on an edge device, in this black box that you can take to the field, as opposed to having to send data back to a server. It’s just one less vulnerability. Everything can be done there on the edge.

It’s kind of the golden nugget for deploying AI for the Army, where it’s going to be done in forward deployed areas, without infrastructure, without these computing resources that are power draining, in vulnerable areas where the enemy is trying to mess them up. Deploying artificial intelligence in the Army is going to be way more difficult than all the things we see being developed on the commercial side, from self-driving cars to Alexa.

Lots of people are developing algorithms, but we don’t necessarily have the hardware to make that a reality for the Army, that’s really sort of missing right now. IOT/AI, what they’re providing is some of the hardware solutions to make that a reality.

LynQ Technologies, this was a very strong company, it had strong VC backing, which de-risks a lot for the Army, and they’ve also been recognized by Techstars, out of the Air Force.

It’s a very mature product. There’s a real near-term win with this, because it’s a ready-to-go product that we could be using now to locate injured soldiers in the field, downed pilots, lost cargo, et cetera. It was a very strong company, well-backed on the commercial side. They clearly had a capability that they could deliver the Army now that we don’t have.

KeriCure – deployable wound care products. Like LynQ, this was a very mature product: You can go on Amazon and buy their product now. It was just a wonder why the Army doesn’t have this in their kit.

Field medics right now could be using this. Yes, there’s some testing that would have to be done with to validate some of the claims, and there is possibly some more development work that has to go into packaging it better for field use. But it’s a mature product that can give immediate, lifesaving capability to soldiers now.

The Army deals with wounds that can’t be dressed properly immediately, that lead to infections. And what this product does, it’s a dressing you spray on wounds to prevent those infections from occurring. We had some combat medics in the group, and they all agreed they could use this in their kit right now.

MEI Micro, it’s a MEMS [Micro Electronic-Mechanical System] IMU [Inertial Measurement Unit]. It’s an order of magnitude improvement on position, navigation, and timing capabilities that we have now. When you’re GPS-denied, the solutions that are out there — including quantum clocks and gyro [gyroscopic] devices — are very expensive, and they’re under development. What they presented showed a leap-ahead capability for a far lower cost.

If it can be realized, it’s a game changer here for assured position, navigation, and timing, which helps you with things like communications, navigation, et cetera, especially in a congested or a GPS-denied environment.

Multiscale Systems, this is a company that competed in a previous round of xTech, when they were a little less mature. They had a meta-material, an engineered material, so you could customize the properties of the material and how you build it. They’re able to make materials for air traffic, cargo, and even lining truck beds, much lighter, much stronger than what we currently have, and for cheaper. With the Army where, especially in logistics and transportation, they can have an immediate impact and save a lot of money and a lot of weight, especially when airdropping cargo and containers and things like that.

Beyond that, there just seems to be a lot of other applications for these materials. Granted, they will need some work in lowering the cost to produce them, but the product itself could be a huge cost savings for the Army and lighten the load a lot in aircraft and ground logistics platforms.

Novaa, that’s the next generation SATCOM [satellite communications]. What these guys are proposing is a brand-new way of handling the spectrum.

In the Army, we are constantly having to tap into multiple frequencies, so you’ll see vehicles, aircraft driving around with lots of antennas on them. If you’re on SATCOM, if you have a radar system, if you’re doing high frequency, ultra-high frequency, everything requires a different physical antenna — and all of these antennas take up space. Not only that, they stick out, they get snagged, get caught, these antennas break. And worst of all, they are targets. They’re highly visible. They stick out like a sore thumb, and they let the enemy know, hey, this is a vehicle of importance, it’s got communication gear or sensor gear.

What they are offering is an antenna designed to replace all those antennas with one single aperture, with a very low profile. The space savings, the drag savings, and the concealed nature of it, on top of having the complexity and the cost of all these antennas replaced with just one, was very appealing.

It was the antenna design, but it was the architecture that goes with it as well, to be able to handle from one aperture, all these other systems that have to tap into that antenna. Really a potentially revolutionary way of approaching the spectrum.

Vita Inclinata is the last one. This is another repeat company, they had previously been in the competition and had come back.

They make a stabilization system for helicopters that are hoisting up either cargo or gurneys with injured people on them. This is a huge problem in the rescue operations, where a little gust or just the wrong movement can cause a load to spin out of control. There’s instances where the Army is dropping expensive cargo because it would bring down the helicopter when they get into a spin, even losing injured people that are being medevac’ed because of these spins. Even rigging these hoist systems is extremely dangerous and requires somebody on the ground.

Vita Inclinata, they’ve developed fully autonomous solution that completely stabilizes any loads, from just a wounded person to tens of thousands of pounds of cargo. They have a ready-to-go, pretty well tested device that could be added on to any helicopter.

Since last year, their company has progressed a lot, with lots of interest across the services and the commercial side, landed some good investments and contracts. And this time around, they really understood where the niche was, where the Army needed this the most. Last year, they were trying to talk to the Future Vertical Lift folks about, “your new aircraft could use this.” But it’s really all the helicopters, especially the existing ones that we’re using now.

The Army does not have this capability and it’s desperately needed.