July 2003

BFRL Monthly Highlights

July 2003

August 2003

September 2003

October 2003

November 2003

PAST Highlights

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NIST Completes Technology Readiness Level Assessment of Unmanned Ground Vehicle Performance for Army Research Laboratory

Beginning in December 2002 and continuing through April 2003, personnel from MEL, BFRL, and ITL conducted a Technology Readiness Level 6 assessment for an Army autonomous mobility program. This effort was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and used Experimental Unmanned Vehicles (XUVs) developed by General Dynamics Robotic Systems among others.

Three similar assessment exercises were conducted in arid, rolling/vegetated, and urban environments, requiring the collaboration of almost 60 personnel. The test vehicles were provided with global positioning system (GPS) waypoints of almost 700 discreet missions, ranging from 500 m to 2000 m in length, totaling over 500 km of autonomous travel. The types of performance data captured after each mission included vehicle log files, operator control unit log files, handwritten observer log sheets, and several streams of video to capture vehicle performance, operator workload, and operator interface screens.

After the XUVs completed their missions, MEL personnel used NIST’s advanced sensors and instrumented HMMWV to capture a series of terrain characterization scans in an effort to quantify the terrain difficulty of each course. The scans included both fine resolution LADAR, course resolution LADAR, and color images, all corre-lated to differential GPS positions. The scans since have been post processed and pieced together to form a
continuous data map of the terrain, allowing further study of vehicle paths and specific terrain features. This data collection effort produced an enormous archive of unmanned ground vehicle data that will be administered by MEL and made available to researchers interested in solving the pertinent problems involved in autonomous mobility of ground vehicles.

Contact:
Adam Jacoff (MEL)
301-975-4235

adam.jacoff@nist.gov

 

BFRL Hosts Workshop on Sensor Data Exchange Standards at the Construction Job Site

BFRL hosted a workshop on sensor data exchange standards at the construction job site on May 29-30, 2003. The workshop was co-sponsored by the Fully Integrated and Automated Technology consortium. The approximately 25 non-NIST participants included representatives from leading U.S. engineering, procurement, and construction companies; leading instrument and equipment manufacturers; universities; and specifications organizations. At the workshop, a group of construction experts was formed to focus on data exchange issues at the job site. The group is part of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) and will work with the OGC to extend their Sensor Web Enablement framework in order to cover the variety of sensors used in construction.

Contact:
William Stone (BFRL)
301-975-6075

william.stone@nist.gov

 

BLCC5 Helps Energy Conservation at NIST

The most recent energy conservation measures being installed at NIST—new office lighting, HVAC control systems, and high-efficiency motors—are expected to save $870,000 in energy costs annually. The Plant Division and its partner in this endeavor, Cogenex Corp., used life-cycle costing (LCC) to arrive at the $870,000 figure. The analysis was made with BLCC5, the NIST Building Life-Cycle Cost computer program developed initially by the Building and Fire Research Laboratory in the early 1970s. It has become the de facto standard for building-related LCC analyses of energy conservation projects in the government. BLCC5 allows the user to take into account all project costs, from acquisition through ownership to disposal of a building or a system, and determines whether a planned energy conservation measure is cost-effective.

Contact:
Sieglinde Fuller (BFRL)
301-975-6134

sieglinde.fuller@nist.gov

or 
Mark Kuklewicz (DA/CFO)
301-975-6918

mark.kuklewicz@nist.gov

 

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