Episode 197: Unseen Paths: SYSNAV’s Infrastructure-Free Positioning with the SYSNAV team

Episode notes

From underground facilities to an urban canyon...

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

Thanks for joining our 16 part FRST Challenge Mini Series recorded at the competition! Tracking and situational awareness has long been a problem for first responders. That's why the FRST Challenge competition is designed to pinpoint 3D tracking technologies that provide one-meter accuracy for first responders in indoor environments, crucial for enhancing their safety during rescue operations.

The 6 finalist teams competed in localization and ruggedization tests at Muscatatuck Urban Training Center from October 23-27, 2023. Winning teams gain access to funding, business support, and live field testing opportunities to evolve their solutions for real-world application.

In this episode:

Discover SYSNAV's magneto-inertial technology that brings positioning accuracy to challenging environments

Learn how SYSNAV's PLD electronic modules and software algorithms work in tandem to guide and track critical movements without reliance on traditional localization infrastructure

Find out how the FRST challenge has helped drive future development of technology for first responders

Click play now to hear from the SYSNAV team!

Founded in 2008 by engineers from top French engineering schools, SYSNAV is a fast-growing French SME with innovation and deep tech at the core of its DNA.

SYSNAV is an expert in navigation, positioning, geolocation and motion capture. Their solutions provide positioning information in all conditions, even in complex environments with no GPS coverage, without the need to deploy any infrastructure.

SYSNAV’s unique technology is applied to many different sectors: medical and pharmaceutical industries, energy and petrochemical industries, manufacturing industries, mining industry, aeronautics and airports, homeland security and defense, mobility and autonomous vehicles.

And that's a wrap for our FRST Challenge Mini Series! Thanks so much for tuning in. Keep an eye out for our next episode!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro
2. 1:14 Meet the SYSNAV team at Muscatatuck
3. 1:35 Lessons from phase four
4. 3:01 Tracking many responders at once
5. 4:08 What police, EMS and firefighters want
6. 5:43 The road to commercialization
7. 7:30 Partnering with companies that already serve responders
8. 8:06 Advice for innovators and first responders
9. 9:28 Ergonomics for firefighters
10. 9:57 Open APIs and integration
11. 10:29 Final thoughts
12. 12:32 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is SYSNAV's technology and how does it work?

The SYSNAV team explains that their technology is an inertial measurement unit (IMU) attached to the leg. For phase five, they developed a new device with five three-axis magnetometers that fuses data from accelerometers, gyrometers, and magnetometers to track position without pre-deployed infrastructure.

Hear it at 1:55

What improvements did SYSNAV make from phase four to phase five?

The SYSNAV team says that in phase four, movements like crouching were challenging to decode. They developed a new device that leverages magnetic field capability much more in the sensor fusion, and in internal testing it handled all those specific movements smoothly.

Hear it at 1:55

Can SYSNAV track multiple first responders at the same time?

The SYSNAV team says they had already developed that capability for other projects, including one that tracks up to 2,000 workers in real time on large petrochemical campuses. Tracking multiple persons simultaneously was not an issue in phase five.

Hear it at 3:32

What did SYSNAV learn about different first responder preferences?

Michael from Business Crescendo says firefighters didn't mind an ankle-worn device and didn't even notice it during interventions, but police officers found it inconvenient. Jonathan says police want battery life for a full shift of 12 to 14 hours, while firefighters only need about two hours because of SCBA limitations.

Hear it at 4:25

What are SYSNAV's next steps toward commercialization?

Jacques from SYSNAV says the next step is driving consistency across prototypes, then industrializing the product through form factor design, usability, and manufacturing processes. They plan to partner with companies already serving first responders rather than selling directly, to integrate with existing tools and software.

Hear it at 6:29

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 197 transcript

Unseen Paths: SYSNAV’s Infrastructure-Free Positioning with the SYSNAV team

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, SYSNAV team

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new Smart Firefighting mini-series created during the phase five of the FRST Challenge, hosted at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center. The FRST Challenge focus is to produce marketable prototypes that demonstrate indoor localization tracking of first responders within one meter accuracy without any pre-deployed infrastructure. Many of you heard stories from phase four, and here in phase five, the challenges were increased by including multiple responders, longer durations, and longer distances. In these conversations, you will hear from many of the entrepreneurs, first responders, and team members involved that address these challenges and opportunities of X, Y, and Z axis tracking from multiple perspectives around scalability, usability, affordability, and more. This challenge is administered by the Indiana University Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab and funded by the NIST Public Safety Communication Research PSCR Division. Also, consider putting the NIST 5x5 Conference on your calendar, located in Chicago, June 25th to 27th, 2024. Enjoy this deep dive into first responder tracking technology, and please reach out with your thoughts. We are standing outside the hospital here in Muscatatuck alongside the Business Crescendo and SYSNAV team. We got Michael, Pierre, Jock, Jonathan. How are you all doing today?

[1:22] SYSNAV team: Yeah, very good. Thank you. I mean, we're We're super excited to be here and part of this phase five. We've worked very hard, but it's great to be here and we're certainly looking forward to seeing the outcome of this competition.

[1:35] Kevin Sofen: Well, I know it's been a long journey to get to here and I can imagine just the amount of work and effort and really lessons learned from phase four to what we are here at phase five. Most of the people listening to this podcast kind of have an idea of the FRST Challenge, but what were some lessons learned from phase four that you've applied to phase five and how has phase five been different from a competitor perspective?

[1:55] SYSNAV team: Sure. So as you know, our technology is really inertial technology, it's an IMU that's attached to the leg and in phase four, we did well, but there were a few areas that were challenging, like crowding or crouching, those movements, we were not able to decode that well. So we've been scratching our heads and what we've done, we've developed a new, more capable device for phase five. was five three-axis magnetometers. And we are leveraging much more the magnetic field capability dimension into the fusion. So we fuse all the elements from the accelerometers, the gyrometers, and the magnetometers. And in our internal testing, we were able really to support very smoothly all those movements. So it's a big improvement over the previous version of the device. And apparently it worked well. So throughout the trials, all those specific movements were transparent to us and we were able to decode them well.

[3:01] Kevin Sofen: And from now phase five, I know there were, it was the prison application, it was a fire trainer, it was the hospital, it was kind of the ruggedization test. But this time they kind of put the test a bit more with multiple people, multiple first responders in the building, sort of talked me through sort of like, What was that like in kind of from a development standpoint, but also kind of like what were your findings from kind of seeing it live with having, I think at 1.4 first responders in a particular building?

[3:32] SYSNAV team: Yeah, so we had developed those capabilities beforehand. We have other projects going on, not for first responder scenario, but for industry worker scenario, like tracking workers on the large petrochemical campus. And we have one specific project, which is about tracking in real time up to 2,000 workers. So tracking multiple persons simultaneously, we would be able to do that. So that was not so much of an issue. Obviously, you had other hiccups throughout the various trials, but simultaneous tracking is okay.

[4:08] Kevin Sofen: That's great. And Michael and Jonathan, kind of interested in your thoughts of like, what's this phase? I mean, even kind of some people that I've had this, I've said before, paint the picture of like what the heck is going on here I mean how is this phase five experience been and sort of paint the picture for those that aren't here today.

[4:25] SYSNAV team: Well it's been a really great experience this is Michael from Business Crescendo especially because we got the opportunity to see various use case scenarios and to see who like the users would be because we've learned that it's probably not one device that's appropriate for every application for example in this phase we had the police or EMS and they have different preferences and they have different needs like the firefighters didn't mind an ankle worn device they said it was they didn't even notice it during the during the intervention but the police guy said no it's kind of a pain i didn't like having something on my ankle so we can take that information and use it and you know maybe it's a small device that's just on the chest that would be more appropriate for the police case yeah so i fully agree with what Michael said, we have a lot of differences between two use cases right now about the battery life as well for instance like a policeman who wants something for the whole shift or so between 12 to 14 for 25 hours sorry and a firefighter like two hours for him is like way enough because the SCBA has four times less capability so it's a great help for us to develop our like range of you know future range of product for every first responder.

[5:43] Kevin Sofen: Well, it's so great to see that you've taken that feedback, you've applied it, now we're here, and you're even kind of continue to learn and apply more. I mean, it's October 2023, and obviously tomorrow, or maybe tomorrow, they're going to be giving away these awards. And nonetheless, I expect full steam ahead from your efforts. But what is next? And what do you see as the roadmap to commercialization? And again, there's been so much this past talk of pie in the sky, smokescreen with Z-axis. tech isn't possible, but I've gained a lot of comfort and confidence that it actually is very much possible, but there's still a little bit of this last mile with the integration and some of the user interface. So, you know, what's next steps with commercialization and roadmap and pilot programs, things like that.

[6:29] SYSNAV team: Yeah, so this is Jacques again from SYSNAV. So let me take that question. I think we had at least one device that performed extremely well across all three scenarios. And some other device, we observed some drift that was unexpected. So to us the learning here is that the technology works and at least we had one device that consistently performed extremely well across all three scenarios. So the next step is really around driving consistency. Obviously we're still having prototypes and not industrial products. So driving consistency across all prototypes and immediately after, industrialize the product. So going through the entire process of form factor design, usability, and then industrial manufacturing process, quality testing so that we can manufacture hundreds or thousands of those devices with a consistent performance and the right price point. And another point that's important is we think that SYSNAV will not be selling a solution directly to the firefighters, that's of course possible. but we think that a better solution would be to partner with someone else who is already serving the first responder community, whether that's a software company, whether that's a current supplier of apparatus or equipment, just to make everyone's life easier. And as you mentioned, integration with their existing tools and their existing software, of course, makes a lot of sense. So we're looking at establishing and building those kinds of collaborations or partnerships or seeking other ones.

[8:06] Kevin Sofen: And from your experiences and lessons learned, I mean, there's a lot of entrepreneurs and firefighters and first responders that listen to this podcast, you all being a team that's kind of been through the wringer and has proven your—tested your tech and has been tested and proven. What would your message be to both like other companies that are trying to innovate in this space or even potentially collaborate with SYSNAV, and then what would you say to first responders that are maybe, you know, on the fence or maybe thinking about trying to adopt new technologies? That's for all of you.

[8:38] SYSNAV team: Yeah, great question. I think there's certainly a cultural aspects. And I mean, like in any area, there will be innovators and first movers, and there will be laggards and a number of entities in between, right? So for us to focus on the innovators and the first movers, and then make sure we also evangelize and convince the other to try all the technology and deploy later on. So a message to the innovators is, don't just keep yourself in your lab, right? If you come up with a great technological solution, which is like very sophisticated and has great performance, that's great, but you do have to keep your eyes open to the world, what are the use cases and understand the challenges of things like regularization, commercialization in the business channel. And one key aspect, according to me, so back to Jonathan from SYSNAV, One of the key aspects is the ergonomics. Firefighters do have a lot of constraints. They have a lot of operational protocol to respect and so where to take another device for them can be super annoying. So we definitely need to spend a lot of time or to do something which is not boring for boring and firefighter friendly. And maybe one thing we should add is This is not a closed solution. It's open, it has open APIs, and we're happy to integrate with any complimentary solution. We're working with 3AM and others and Dashi, and we're happy to integrate with any GIS system or incident management system, supervision system to make sure that the seamless solution working. So happy to discuss with the first responders about that and see what their requirements are.

[10:29] Kevin Sofen: I love that and appreciate that openness and willingness and to everyone that's listening, I'm sure you can tell we are officially in the field. We've got car doors closing, we've got work trucks going around, there's other teams sort of yelling and making noise in the background. But I will say that these kind of field days are really what I live for and what makes me just love my job and being able to collaborate with innovators like you. And so I think kind of to give you all sort of maybe a last sort of a kind of say is called the mic drop in a sense of like a question, a thought, an insight, a challenge to everyone listening. So, you know, maybe start with one of you and then you all have to say something, but any sort of like final thoughts you can leave us to what you're doing today.

[11:06] SYSNAV team: Yeah, final thoughts. I mean, it's great to see the progress we've made, but also the other teams. So, you know, I think what's really important is progress, the science, progress of technology, and progress, the application of that technology in the field for the benefit of the community. So we're really excited to be in that space and participating into this effort, you know, and hopefully we have a part of it and, you know, we'll be successful. This is Michael again, and what I've been really impressed with is the collaborative nature of this whole event. Like, obviously the teams are competing, there's a lot of money at stake, but we're all very professional, and last night especially, we had a pretty open discussion about who's doing what are the challenges, how could we work together, and I think that's really great and that's really important for making progress for everyone.

[11:52] Kevin Sofen: That's awesome.

[11:53] SYSNAV team: Yeah, all the challenges are quite super complex, like location and location for indoor location for first responder like capability gap number one for years and years. So we know this is a complex challenge. And so we know we're progressing. We know we are part of the solution. And we're super happy as well not to maybe one day like really save real firefighter lives.

[12:19] Kevin Sofen: Well, it's very admirable and brave and takes a lot of courage what you're doing. So I thank you all, keep doing what you're doing, and I look forward to further collaborating in the future.

[12:27] SYSNAV team: Thank you, Kevin.

[12:28] Kevin Sofen: Until next time. Thanks for listening to today's episode. What did you think? What'd you learn? Hopefully something, right? Please reach out on social media with your thoughts on this episode and any other suggestions for future content. We look forward to capturing more important stories across public safety and are here at your service.