Team Abstracts

Autonomous Robotics for Installation and Base Operations (ARIBO)

Team ARIBO—Autonomous Robotics for Installation and Base Operations—is demonstrating the use of autonomous vehicles to connect patients on military bases to medical care and students to classrooms with the goal of extending to wounded warriors on the battlefield and other applications. Participants include Comet, Induct Inc., Stanford University, University of Michigan, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Army TARDEC, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and U.S. Army Fort Bragg. According to the team, the ARIBO project has led Induct, Inc., to establish a U.S. company, hire their first U.S. employees, and move manufacturing to the U.S. Department of Justice company Unicor.

Closed Loop Healthcare

The goal of Closed-loop Health Care is to transform individual care from a medical systems focus to one centered on the patient; integrating home, primary care, hospital, assisted living, and pharmacy into seamless personal care for an improved quality of life. The project is led by Julian Goldman of Massachusetts General Hospital and Marge Skubic of the University of Missouri. Other participating organizations are the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, UL, DocBox, U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Intel, Z-Wave Alliance, RTI International, PrismTech, Nonnatech, Talend, Queralt, and ProactiveSense.

Connecting Smart Systems to Optimize Emergency Neurological Life Support

Effective care in the first hours and days after a brain injury is crucial both for the health of the patient and managing the high costs of treating such injuries. The team is developing smart systems that link intelligent incident-site assessment, optimal ambulance routing, and a smart intensive care unit, or ICU, to save lives and start brain-injured patients on a path to recovery. The team is led by Moberg Research, Inc., with participation from IBM and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Convergence of Smart Home and Building Architecture

Today, solutions for energy management, electric vehicles, communication and infotainment, and other smart systems are developed separately for commercial buildings and homes. This inhibits interoperability, increases costs, and limits sharing of innovative approaches. This team, led by the IEEE Standards Association, is working to develop shared standards that promote the convergence of smart solutions across home, business, and factory settings.

Cyber Secure Synchrophasor Security Fabric

A smart energy grid changes moment by moment with rapid variations in electricity use and generation that must be constantly balanced. Managing this balancing act requires sensors, called synchrophasors, distributed throughout the grid to provide constant awareness to grid controllers. Because of their critical function, these sensors are also targets for malicious attacks. This team of eight companies and Texas Tech University are using advanced cybersecurity strategies and an Internet of Things approach to provide for a secure and reliable electric grid.

Enhanced Water Distribution Infrastructure

The Smart Water Assets team is using advanced communication and information technologies to help utilities save water, reduce wastewater overflows, improve public safety, and enhance customer service, including reduced water costs. The team is led by Jason Ellis of Qualcomm and includes the participation of both Qualcomm and CH2MHill.

Event Management for Smart Cities

Whether it’s an Olympic event or a small-town Fourth of July parade, cities everywhere want the events they host to be successful, safe, and cost-effective. They want to put their best foot forward for residents, businesses, and visitors alike. IBM and AT&T are working together on a smart event management platform based on cloud services and Internet of Things strategies that enable cities at any scale to manage the full event lifecycle from planning to post-event review.

Project Boundary

Small changes in what we do at work and how we do it can translate into big improvements in personal health for all aspects of our lives. Workplace wellness programs benefit not only employees but the businesses in which they work. This team from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Qualcomm is using smart systems to create workplace environments that make healthy behaviors fun and easy for an improved quality of life.

SCALE: Safe Community Alert Network (a.k.a. Public Safety for Smart Communities)

Montgomery County, Md., is working with eight commercial, university, and agency partners on the SCALE Safe Community Alert Network. SCALE uses advanced sensor and network technologies to connect citizens and first responders through an affordable, easily-maintained system. The project is led by Montgomery County, University of California, Irvine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and IBM.

Smart Cities USA

Intel and San Jose, Calif. are using Internet of Things strategies to create a “sustainability lens” for real-time, city-wide awareness of air quality, traffic, and other factors. Designed to help the city achieve a Green Vision for driving economic growth, fostering 25,000 clean tech jobs, creating environmental sustainability, and enhancing the quality of life for its citizens, the project is a partnership between Intel Corporation and the City of San Jose.

Smart Emergency Response System (SERS)

Smart Emergency Response integrates cyber physical systems—autonomous aircraft, agile robots, sensored search and rescue animals, disaster area ad hoc networks, and first responder teams—to provide quick response, comprehensive awareness, and effective resource applications to save lives and speed recovery for the full spectrum of disaster scenarios. Participants include the University of Washington and BluHaptics (for telerobotics), National Instruments (for robot systems and software), MathWorks (for the optimal dispatch system), Boeing (drones), MIT Media Lab and the University of North Texas (communications networks), the University of North Carolina (instrumented search and rescue dogs), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (humanoid robots).

Smart Energy CPS

The smart energy systems of the future pose grand challenges for security, resilience, and complexity management that can only be addressed through research partnerships across sectors and experimentation and testing platforms for national-level grid exercises. Five leading universities, one national lab, and three industrial corporations have come together to tackle these grand challenges and  provide for a future grid that improves our economy, reduces carbon emissions, and creates new business opportunities.

Smart Home/Business Gateway Platform

This team, comprising experts from five corporations, is developing an integrated gateway to the home or business that enables effective energy management, intelligent security, home patient or elder care, and other smart systems capabilities.

Smart Manufacturing

Smart manufacturing uses intelligent systems to increase efficiency in energy and materials usage, reduce design and production costs, enable sustainable production, promote safety, and minimize waste and loss. The team, led by the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition with partners from industry and academia from across the nation, is developing a testing platform that integrates basic manufacturing elements into virtual testing and experimentation platforms for research, design, and implementation in all areas of manufacturing.

Smart Power, Smart Light, Made in Detroit

Key characteristics of 21st century commercial buildings are efficiency and agility—including the ability to manage power and light in response to changing activities and floor space configurations. Two Detroit-based technology startups are working together, leveraging local talent in software, design, and engineering, to develop smart power and lighting systems for intelligent building management.

Smart Roads

Smart roads use advanced sensors and control systems to manage traffic flows to reduce congestion and travel time, increase safety, improve fuel efficiency, and reduce transportation costs. A joint effort of university partners, the team is demonstrating a secure, reliable, and effective smart road implementation focused on the Interstate 15 corridor in San Diego.

Smart Rooftop

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment (HVAC)—much of it located on rooftops—consumes up to 40 percent of the energy used by a building. Managing that equipment effectively can dramatically improve the energy usage profile of a commercial building or a corporate campus. Four corporations have teamed up to demonstrate how smart management systems produce energy savings at the building or campus levels and create new business opportunities.

Smart Shape Technology

A customer wanders the hardware aisles, broken fitting or connector in hand, looking for just the right-shape replacement part. Finding the right product or replacement to fit the need can be a frustrating challenge. Catalogs and web photos aren’t a very effective way to connect local manufacturers with that customer. It all boils down to shape. This team of university and corporate partners is developing shape-based search and 3D manufacturing capabilities that can meet consumer needs and drive “Make-Local,” the local manufacturing business growth equivalent of Eat Local for regional farms.

Smart Vehicle Communication

Private and public vehicles carrying advanced communications systems are increasingly becoming the “eyes and ears” for an integrated transportation system of the future. A diverse team of industry partners is working together to create vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-roadway, and vehicle-to-pedestrian connectivity that increases transportation safety, security, efficiency, performance, and convenience.

Smartphone Disaster Mode

When disaster strikes, the smartphone in your pocket should be a powerful ally, helping you locate resources, navigate to safety, assist others, and maintain contact with loved ones. University partners working with emergency management partners are enabling smartphones and their connection networks to operate effectively in disaster environments and to serve as intelligent information resources for victims, first responders, and emergency managers.

South East Michigan Smart Transportation

Advanced smart vehicles will communicate not only for comfort and convenience, but for safety, crash avoidance, emergency, and other critical functions. A dropped phone call is inconvenient; a critical dropped vehicle message could be dangerous. The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and NextEnergy have teamed up to create an electric vehicle application that is based on the open, resilient vehicle communication platform developed by USDOT. A long-term goal is to use this reliable platform for applications for crash avoidance, traffic rerouting, smart parking, and more.

The Agile Fractal Grid

Today’s electric grid is shifting from a focus on large, central power plants and controls to one of more distributed resources, including rooftop solar, requiring a more distributed control strategy. This new smart grid model—the Agile Fractal Grid—uses a combination of connectivity, high-performance computing, and a new generation of digital controls to operate the grid with greater agility, real-time precision, and dynamic alignment with changing local conditions. The team is developing a demonstration to illustrate the application of the Agile Fractal Grid concept at all scales from a factory to a continent.

Transactive Energy Management

Transactive energy is an emerging approach that uses market forces to match supply and demand for a more agile and responsive electric grid, providing greater options for consumers and enabling more efficient management for suppliers. IBM and AT&T are developing a Transactive Energy Management (TEM) platform that can manage diverse devices, systems, and control signals along the electricity supply chain for more efficient, market-driven grid systems. The goal is to save energy, increase reliability, reduce outages, and empower customers.

XMPP (a.k.a. Service Enablement Provider)

Increasingly, smart devices are connected to the Internet to expand their capabilities and uses. The result is a rapidly expanding Internet of Things that requires devices to speak a common language through shared interfaces if they are to communicate productively. This team is working to demonstrate how shared standards create platforms for interoperability, connectivity, and innovation in the Internet of Things era.