Military Bases and Cities Share Smart Technology Challenges and Solutions

Cities and military bases are adopting next-generation Internet of Things technologies to provide an array of benefits, including enhanced infrastructure, improved services and beefed-up security. In some cases, cities and bases face the same challenges, and the US Ignite nonprofit helps them find mutual solutions.

“There’s a lot of technical challenges of getting the network deployed, or that sensor deployed. Like, we ran into challenges around getting power out to the right locations in our civilian work with community partners as well as on the installation,” explained Nick Maynard, US Ignite CEO. “There’s a number of challenges that are similar: getting that fiber deployed or that power drop in place. That’s universal.”

Operating like a high-tech startup, the organization delivers customized results through stakeholder engagement, technical expertise and targeted tools, according to its website. “In collaboration with our partners, we deliver project outcomes that include breakthrough technologies while creating innovative new jobs, startups and services,” the site explains. US Ignite works with communities, military bases, startups and researchers to solve economic development and technology innovation challenges.

“When we started 10 years ago, that was really our bread and butter—working with these communities. We try and make sure that the broader set of stakeholders from the community and the base are sitting around that table and talking with each other,” Maynard offered. “We spend months, basically, doing a listening tour, one-on-one conversations to small group discussions, to get down to the core challenges that the base or the city are running into.”

He cited Fort Carson, Colorado, as a recent success. Base officials identified transportation as the number one challenge, which led to the Fort Carson Smart Transportation Testbed, a $4 million program that tested autonomous vehicles and sensor-based technologies to reduce military transportation costs, deliver faster services on-site and improve overall public safety.

The joint effort between US Ignite, Fort Carson, the city of Colorado Springs and the University of Colorado’s Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles was a two-year effort that ended in 2019-2021. It was funded and managed by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.

The US Ignite team wanted to explore the art of the possible and find systems that offered Fort Carson a genuine return on investment and benefits to the base and the neighboring community. Ultimately, they supported multiple solutions: an unmanned aerial vehicle to find foreign debris on runways, automatic vehicles to shuttle riders to four key facilities on base and a weather-related public safety app.

“That all came out of months of discussions with them trying to figure out some specific technologies that we could demonstrate that might have real return on investment and have a chance to transition over long term,” Maynard said.

The drone was built by Boston-based GreenSight Inc., which specializes in robotics for collecting sports and agricultural data. “They actually started in the civilian world with tracking golf courses and things like that and then evolved to all these different Defense Department and other civilian uses, like public safety use cases,” Maynard recalled.

The company was contracted to pilot real-time detection of runway foreign object debris through their Automated Aerial Runway Inspection and Safety Scan system. The system integrates a specially designed mix of computer vision and machine learning algorithms to detect and classify foreign debris on asphalt surfaces. After detecting objects, it streams information and images back to an operator-control tablet.

Automated vehicles have the potential to reduce traffic congestion, pollution and transportation costs, the US Ignite website notes. The Mountain Express Automated Shuttle electric vehicles can perform all driving functions independently under certain conditions. Partner company First Transit is in charge of shuttle service operations at Fort Carson, and the vehicle itself is a Polaris GEM custom-configured by Perrone Robotics using their TONY (TO Navigate You) autonomy kit.

The Inclement Weather Decision Support App is an artificial intelligence-powered application that provides operational recommendations to Fort Carson leaders based on the predicted impact of weather on traffic safety for commuters. It provides an easy-to-understand view of the anticipated weather impact on roadway safety across the broader region and actionable recommendations that optimize safety and productivity. US Ignite developed the app as part of the Artificial Intelligence for Traffic and Weather program funded to advance the Army Installation Modernization Pilot Program under the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Installations, Energy and Environment).

Previously, the Fort Carson leadership relied solely on a mix of weather forecasts and ad hoc community coordination for base closure decisions. “This is in Colorado, so they have a lot of windstorms or snow or sleet and hail. They’re constantly trying to decide whether to close the base down. And the weather is very different, even just a mile or two away, and they have people driving in from all over the region,” Maynard said. “So, they were looking at five different weather apps and a phone tree and calling each other at 4:00 in the morning, and basically, looking out the window to decide whether or not to close the base down.”

Closing the base is, of course, primarily a safety issue, but it can also be costly. “If they close the base and didn’t need to, it could be a $2.5 million to $3 million impact on the budget—installation, training, a whole range of other effects. So, we had leveraged sensors that the neighboring city—Colorado Springs—had deployed and then some of our own sensors. We combined that with a whole range of other data sets to predict it out, should the base close or not, and then push that to an app on somebody’s phone,” Maynard said.  

While cities and bases face some of the same obstacles to adopting smart technologies, the military has unique challenges such as security, Maynard pointed out. “If you’re trying to get that sensor or that data to connect into that Defense Department network, there’s a review process that goes on, and that can certainly slow things down beyond just the challenges of getting the fiber deployed or that sensor deployed or making data accessible.”

He added that US Ignite prioritizes the privacy of soldiers and civilian personnel on military bases. “What we have tried to do is always make sure that the data that we’re gathering is anonymized, so that you can’t identify one particular service member or civilian on the installation. We’re trying to make sure that we’re not incorporating classified or other sensitive data. Once you start to incorporate that, it limits the number of folks on the installation that will have access to it or make it that much harder to share some of these tools with the neighboring city.”

US Ignite launched about a decade ago with the mission of helping communities with broadband challenges by “working with those community leaders, industry partners and other folks” because “we need a better strategy around getting these networks deployed,” Maynard said. That mission has since evolved into helping determine how best to use the networks once they are in place.

“A lot of the immediate benefits are based around smart city pilots or data support programs or workforce development, or a whole range of other programs that we’re seeing in our community partners,” Maynard said. “We have about 50 of them that we work with around the country. And then we’ve got test beds, both civilian and Defense Department, that we manage in seven of those locations. Those really focus on transitioning these technologies, focused on that Valley of Death for these technologies to make sure they transition over long term.”