Earlier this month, staff and faculty returning to California State University, Bakersfield for the first time since the school went remote last March were treated to another familiar sign of life on campus: some kind of technological activity happening outside of the Engineering Complex.
At the helm of this recent project is Fab Lab specialist Bobby Hartsock, who has been working on autonomous vehicles (and test-driving them around campus) as part of the Joint Interagency Field Experimentation program by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. People within and outside of NPS work on various projects in the weeks leading up to a five-day event in Camp Roberts starting on Aug. 23.
“Essentially, it’s a big playground to run experiments and test equipment in a realistic and collaborative setting,” Hartsock said. “As it’s run by the Navy, the experiments should pertain to the Navy’s objectives in some way.”
The program, which happens four times a year, gives faculty, students, private companies and others in academia the opportunity to demonstrate new technologies relating to Department of the Navy and Department of Defense research. Projects focus on technology that could benefit the military and first responders in one way or another.
“We’re so excited that Bobby will be representing CSUB and the Fab Lab in this program for not one, but two projects,” said Dr. Andrea Medina, director of grants and outreach for CSUB’s School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering, which oversees the Fab Lab. “It’s been fun to see him out with the vehicles on campus, getting them ready for the demonstration. This is a big deal, and we’ll be cheering him on from here.”
Hartsock and friend Greg Albrecht, who is involved with both San Francisco Wireless Emergency Mesh and Orion Labs, had two projects approved for the program. The duo had already been testing ways to send data via radio before applying to the program. What they were working on aligned perfectly with JIFX’s mission.
The first project is control of unmanned systems via mesh network, where two autonomous vehicles are controlled using mesh radios, one on each vehicle and others throughout the environment where the vehicles are running. The vehicles can be controlled by a joystick or follow along a predetermined path on its own.
“These mesh radios automatically forward data amongst themselves so that all radios receive all necessary data,” Hartsock explained. “There are some peculiarities with mesh networks, however, and JIFX provides a testing environment where we can properly assess the impact on control of an unmanned system.”
This project ties into NPS’s objective of performing research on mobile ad-hoc networking for control of unmanned systems, Hartsock said. It could be used for first responders in urban areas, many of which already have pre-existing networks for this kind of system. In addition to transmitting and receiving control data for the autonomous vehicle, the mesh network can also stream video, make internet-based phone calls and share files.
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