Twenty companies have demonstrated technologies that are built to detect improvised explosive devices at the U.S. military’s Culvert Denial Challenge event, Defense News reported Friday.Paul McCleary writes the Army Research Laboratory and the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization evaluated unmanned ground and aerial anti-IED systems during the competition held at Fort Benning in Georgia from Sept. 29 to Oct. 10.
The Pentagon picked 20 vendors to compete for a contract to develop platforms intended to discover IEDs in road culverts.
“The goal through 2015 is to continue to talk to industry, and we constructed this contract in order to build the mechanism to do that now,†said Matthew Way, a JIEDDO program integrator, according to Defense News.
McCleary reports that 10 contractors showed off micro-radar technologies, seismic sensors and hyperspectral imaging systems for the surveillance challenge, while the other 10 showcased ground robots, quadcopters and electromagnetic sensors for the inspection challenge.
