Wright State wins $2M contract for sensor research

Wright State Center for Sensor Exploitation Director Brian Rigling.

A $2 million research grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory is the latest win for Wright State’s Center for Sensor Exploitation.

The new contract expands and enhances research collaborations with scores of students at the high school, undergraduate and graduate levels—the core function of the center in its 10-year history.

The center’s mission is mining actionable information from video, radar, infrared, acoustic or chemical sensors deployed in situations such as: UAV recon, sniffing hazardous compound scents, monitoring water levels on the Great Lakes and detecting small craft used to fly drugs across the Mexican border.

“We have been very fortunate to partner with the AFRL Sensors Directorate in advancing the state-of-the-art in these exciting areas while impacting large numbers of students interested in the STEM fields,” said center director Brian Rigling.

Through creative collaborations with students and faculty from electrical engineering, computer science, biomedical engineering, physics, earth sciences and the Wright State Research Institute, along with defense and industrial partners, the Center for Sensor Exploitation has grown to include more than 100 participants and nearly $2 million in revenue in 2013.