COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado, January 25, 2018 – C-TRAC, the Center for Technology, Research and Commercialization, is seeking industry partners for the CyberWorx #PNTNext week-long design sprint, planned for February 26 through March 2, 2018 at the United States Air Force Academy.
CyberWorx educates airmen while simultaneously partnering with industry to solve cyber problems facing our nation. Design thinking – a structured framework for understanding and pursuing innovation in ways that encourage outside-the-box thinking – is featured prominently in the CyberWorx process.
The Center for Technology, Research and Commercialization (www.c-trac.org), located at the Catalyst Campus in downtown Colorado Springs, is a Colorado 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports CyberWorx by collaborating to build a dynamic, diverse group of industry participants and project management.
This project asks industry, government and academic experts to team up to create a design for reliable land-based positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) to complement and back up global positioning systems (GPS) to ensure the availability of uncorrupted PNT data for military and civilian users when GPS signals are corrupted, degraded, unreliable, or otherwise unavailable.
Officially, the problem statement for this design challenge reads, “How might we provide PNT independent of blue force RF signals for small unit overland navigation and timing?”
A directive from Congress specifically requested this issue be investigated due to concerns that the United States is over-reliant on vulnerable GPS technology. As General John Hyten recently said before the Armed Services Committee, “Maybe we were spoiled [because space was once considered a safe environment, but] we can’t assume that anymore. The military needs to look at precision navigation and timing as a mission and build resilience into that architecture as well as defending GPS on orbit.”
Industry members and academic leaders who wish to contribute to this week-long design sprint are encouraged to begin the process by submitting an application at c-trac.org/cyberworx or contacting the Center for Technology, Research, and Commercialization (C-TRAC) at info@c-trac.org with any questions about the sprint. Benefits of participating include interfacing with Air Force leaders and stakeholders, building relationships and partnerships with other commercial industry, and providing recommendations for applying commercial products and solutions to the Air Force enterprise.
C-TRAC is looking for industry partners with expertise including, but not limited to, the following: GPS, satellites, microtechnology, air traffic control, RF transmission, cellular frequencies, network engineering, Internet of Things (IoT) receivers, device manufacturing, and software engineering.