September 2010 — OpCoast wins Army SBIR Phase II Award
OpCoast was selected to move on to Phase II of the OrthopterNets program in September 2010. We refer to the use of insects for intelligent message passing as “OrthopterNets,” named after the insect order Orthoptera which includes common crickets, katydids, and related calling insects. Together with Purdue and Texas A&M Universities, OpCoast plans to demonstrate insect based networking to address the problem of communicating sensor or other data in difficult environments. The two year program plan calls for both acoustic and RF based networking of information.
June 2010 — OpCoast Presents OrthopterNets at ISSSR
OpCoast Presents OrthopterNets at the 2010 ISSSR Conference held in Springfield, MO USA during June 21-24, 2010. The presentation summarizes work to date on the OrthopterNet project which aims to augment calling insects to become sensors and communication devices.
April 2010 — OpCoast Completes Army SBIR
OpCoast completes its SNEAK (Sensor/Network Electronic Attack Kit) software project for the US Army, RDECOM/CERDEC I2WD Fusion and Modeling Division, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey under SBIR contract W15P7T-07-C-H407. SNEAK, patents pending, features GPGPU (general purpose graphics processing unit) accelerated RF propagation computation, SNEAK provides physically-realistic analysis of RF sensors and jammers for dynamic scenarios that occur within complex urban and other forms of terrain. Accurate models for sensors, jammers and noise sources of several types can move throughout a mission scene, change their operating states, and interact in a ray-traced propagation environment. Jammer effectiveness is computed in terms of noise to signal power and also for bit rate for various modulation schemes.
December 2009 — OpCoast Submits Two Patents
OpCoast submits provisional patent applications in the areas of RF ray-tracing for propagation analysis and its application to jammer analysis. These inventions were developed as part of the Army’s SBIR program award that began in February 2008. Their use is included in our SNEAK application software which provides detailed scene analysis for sensors and jammers.
July 28, 2009 — OpCoast Press Coverage
Our SBIR Phase I work for the Army, entitled OrthopterNets, has been covered by New Scientist and Wired magazines. The New Scientist article mentions some of the applications of the technology and some of the challenges that we are studying in the program. The Wired article briefly mentions the networking aspect of the work and is contained at this link.
April 28, 2009 — OpCoast awarded network simulation patent
OpCoast founder Dr. David Rhodes was awarded US Patent 7,526,420 entitled “Method and system for virtual injection of network application codes into network simulation”. This invention allows A technique is provided for translating one or more networked applications to act virtually as if operating at a node or communication point within a network simulation, more detailed information can be found in the link at the US Patent Office.
April 24, 2009 — OpCoast Awarded Army SBIR Phase I program
OpCoast was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) effort by the US Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Defense (CBD) organization under topic C091-105-0118, entitled “Bio-MEMs Agile Sensor Platforms and Communication Networks.” Our effort, called “OrthopterNets: Using Insects to Sense and Communicate,” will leverage the world-class MEMS and bio-system interfaces technology of Texas A&M University. We will develop technology to enable acoustic and RF based networking of sensor and other data on insect nodes.
May 13-14, 2008 — OpCoast Presents a Paper at International Conference
OpCoast personnel present a paper at the 2008 IEEE COMCAS conference which tool place in Tel Aviv. Israel. The paper was titled “Urban Network Effects Simulation” authored by Drs. Rhodes and Epstein of OpCoast and Dr. Perlman of the US Army RDECOM.
February 2008 — OpCoast Begins Army SBIR Phase II Program
OpCoast was awarded Phase II of an Army RDECOM/CERDEC, Fort Monmouth, NJ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) effort. The effort will focus on the disruption of networks in urban settings by combining RF antenna and propagation with sensor and jammer models, along with powerful optimization and co-design approaches.