Feb 03, 2021
The Army wants to expand its existing smart base transportation testbed at Fort Carson, Colo., to include smart traffic and weather artificial intelligence platforms.
Fort Carson’s testbed already includes a 4G/5G network, an autonomous vehicle shuttle for personnel and drone airfield services for debris detection and analysis. Now the Army plans to leverage the existing testbed and expand into the Colorado Springs local community with sensor deployment, data integration and the development of AI models and decision dashboards that integrate traffic and weather-related information.
The Army Corps of Engineers announced on Feb. 1 that it will be partnering with US Ignite in a follow-on contract to R&D work the nonprofit performed on the smart transportation platform. The initial project also gave the Army the opportunity to experiment with AI, data analytics and edge computing.
When Mahadev Satyanarayanan, group professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert in edge computing, needed a network to test his edge computing applications, he knew he wanted something that was low in latency, reliable and not susceptible to any performance degradation.
Satyanarayanan turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Federated Wireless for help, and the university decided to deploy an LTE private wireless network using Citizens Broadband Radio Services General Authorized Access (GAA) 3.5GHz spectrum.
Although Carnegie Mellon has a Wi-Fi network, Satyanarayanan said it was important for his lab to use a reliable network that could handle a heavy traffic load without slowing down, something that Wi-Fi doesn t do very well. And he wanted a network that could be managed from end-to-end. We were very interested in exploring edge-native use cases on the campus and we wanted to create a test bed so we could do head-to-head comparisons of real use cas