Cooperative use of standoff and UAV sensors for CBRNE detection
William J. Marinelli, Thomas Schmit, Julia Rentz Dupuis, Phil Mulhall, Philly Croteau, David Manegold, Manal Beshay, Marvin Lav · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2015
The defense of the US armed forces against chemical and biological (CB) attack is transitioning from a focus on standoff detection of these threats to the concept of Early Warning (EW). In this approach an array of dual-use and low-burden dedicated use sensor capabilities are used to replace longer-range single use sensors to detect a CB attack. In this paper we discuss the use of passive broadband thermal imaging to detect chemical vapor clouds as well as a developing suite of compact UAV-borne chemical and radiological sensors for the investigation of threats detected by these indirect approaches. The sensors include a colorimetric ammonia sensor, a chemical sensor based on ion mobility spectrometry, and a radiation detector based on gamma ray scintillation. The implementation and initial field tests of each of these sensor modalities is discussed and future plans for the further development of the capability is presented.