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NEWS | April 18, 2023

NSWC Crane innovators partner with industry entrepreneurs to accelerate development of novel technology concept

By Sarah K. Miller, NSWC Crane Corporate Communications

Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane) continues its partnership into 2023 with industry entrepreneurs who won first place in a pitch competition last fall. Blazing Audio, the winning startup company, leveraged NSWC Crane Intellectual Property (IP) during the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) Foundry cohort and Showcase Day in September 2022.

Ryan Dowd, an Electronics Engineer at NSWC Crane, says working with entrepreneurs and startups creates an environment of rapid iteration in the military technology development cycle.

“We’re cutting the development cycle from ten years to like two or three,” says Dowd, who worked on this initiative. “This is super iterative; from idea to paper to product to a demo in a year. There’s urgency with the threats we’re facing—in some ways we aren’t fast enough. This accelerated process helps fill that urgency and make sure warfighters stay alive.”

Blazing Audio was formed during the NSIN Foundry 2022 cohort, which is a six-month startup acceleration program culminating in the NSIN Foundry Showcase Day. The entrepreneurs at Blazing Audio explored dual-use applications through implementing a customer discovery process. For winning first place in the Foundry Showcase Day, Blazing Audio was awarded $20,000 to launch their business.

Blazing Audio used NSWC Crane-developed networked ultrasonic speaker IP to create technical solutions for both the Department of Defense (DoD) mission—which is focused on hailing and warning—and industry applications focused on physical therapy. Once the NSIN Foundry program completed, NSWC Crane and Blazing Audio continued its relationship through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA).

Zavosh Zaboliyan, the Co-Founder and President of Blazing Audio, says their experience with NSWC Crane and the NSIN Foundry pitch competition aligns with their future company initiatives.

“Blazing Audio is excited to have the opportunity to partner with NSWC Crane to address warfighter challenges using our systems integration and commercialization skillset,” says Zaboliyan. “We see our partnership with Crane allowing us to accelerate and drive down technical debt internal to the Crane team’s product development.”

Maria Duran, the Technology Transfer (T2) Director at NSWC Crane, says the NSIN Foundry program is a great T2 opportunity.

“Foundry matches entrepreneurs from any industry sector with NSWC Crane developed technology, scientists and engineers,” says Duran. “This program helps spur ideation on commercial applicability well beyond what we imagined and creates opportunities for commercialization and economic growth.”

Dr. Corey Bergsrud is a co-inventor of the NSWC Crane IP and serves as the Principal Investigator for this effort to help optimize and grow the partnership between Blazing Audio and NSWC Crane. Dr. Bergsrud has more than a decade of defense startup experience and was able to use that experience to rapidly develop each phase of this project in a year and a half: the initial demand signal of future capability need, team formation, idea discovery, IP, and project execution.

“This partnership offers a mechanism to rapidly mature an idea to a minimum viable product (MVP), and then ultimately to a product—commercial and defense—much quicker than traditional methods used within legacy defense practices,” says Dr. Bergsrud.

Dowd says the process has been a fun experience to see the startup’s creativity in action.

“We had an advisory role to help setup competition,” says Dowd. “Blazing Audio didn’t have a requirement; it was fun to see what they came up with.”

Dr. Bergsrud says it is important to share how a federal laboratory in the Department of Defense (DoD) can effectively work with startup companies.

“I think this is key to addressing as this will take some restructuring and creation of new processes to adopt to this model of entrepreneurship and start-up innovation pursuit within defense labs,” says Dr. Bergsrud.

Figure 1: The 2019 U.S. Navy patent "Handheld acoustic hailing and disruption system methods" by inventor Christopher A. BrownAn ultrasonic distributed network of speakers

This technology was developed in 2021 from an NSWC Crane 2019 patent.

Dr. Bergsrud says that through a customer discovery process conducted by NSWC Crane experts, current hailing and warning capabilities, including long-range acoustic devices (LRAD), are typically bulky, large, and non-networked systems.

“The goal was to disaggregate the chunky, fixed systems into smaller, network distributed array speakers with unmanned systems as the delivery platform,” says Dr. Bergsrud. “Current solutions have limitations in stand-off range and speech intelligibility and the performance can be severely degraded in different weather and environmental conditions. Our idea is to enhance the hail and warn mission function through using a swarm of drones equipped with speaker systems—and to network the speakers and drones together to form an array that offers a capability that gets many smaller things closer to a target. When each individual speaker system and drone are working collaboratively together to cohere their sound waves to the threat it could enhance and greatly improve the hail and warn mission function compared to the current practice”.

He says this process started when the idea was created to improve existing capabilities in new ways.

“…such as enhancing the mission of acoustic hailing and warning devices. Then, the customer and stakeholder discovery process helped determine and validate the value proposition of the idea,” says Dr. Bergsrud. “Hailing and warning technology has been around a long time and is not going away anytime soon. Through the customer and stakeholder discovery process, the team learned of many existing pains that end-users have with the existing technology where the proposed if validated as feasible would greatly enhance this mission capability.”

Dowd says there are characteristics about the NSWC Crane IP that make it unique. 

“It’s special because it is an ultrasonic distributed network of a speaker system,” says Dowd. “This technology is many things combined together—it’s never been combined and used in this way to the best of our knowledge. Having multiple ultrasonic speakers brings a lot of ability to reach out to the potential adversary and scan areas at a safer distance. Blazing Audio has been able to commercialize it in a non-defense related way. This is a really difficult physics problem—if we can pull it off, it opens doors for a lot of cool things.”

Federal labs leveraging NSIN tools for rapid innovation for the warfighter

Working with the NSIN program offers both government and industry benefits.

“It’s an accelerated opportunity to explore additional market possibilities from a commercial perspective, i.e., discover if the original idea or some pivot of the original idea can create a profitable business opportunity,” says Dr. Bergsrud. “There could be potential cost sharing avenues/metrics with the defense lab as well as each expanding their networking opportunities for increased market awareness. This innovative process through NSIN Foundry has the potential to impact both the military and economic prospect unleashing American ingenuity and creative values to help accelerate competing faster in the global market space especially as is necessary in times of Great Power Competition.”

Dowd says the “Valley of Death” is a common phrase in defense technology that describes the often lengthy technology development cycle for the DoD.

“Simply put, the Valley of Death describes when a technology or capability is dropped due to stagnation or lack of funding,” says Dowd. “When combatant commanders say they need a solution, they need it right now. Building from requirements means the solution may not be timely or relevant.”

Dowd says through leveraging Technology Transfer and NSIN programs to work with entrepreneurs, more robust solutions can be quickly developed.

“By leveraging programs like NSIN and working with industry, challenges are tackled immediately,” says Dowd.

Zaboliyan says the Blazing Audio team was able to research many avenues for the Crane IP—and do it fast.

“We had a lot of fun and learned so much about the different technologies and opportunities for collaboration with the government and different customers,” says Zaboliyan. “We used our time to complete 300+ customer discoveries to really understand the market potential and identified our roadmap. [We] identified industry needs where novel Crane technology can be leveraged.”

About NSWC Crane NSWC Crane is a naval laboratory and a field activity of Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) with mission areas in Expeditionary Warfare, Strategic Missions and Electronic Warfare. The warfare center is responsible for multi-domain, multi- spectral, full life cycle support of technologies and systems enhancing capability to today's Warfighter.

Join Our Team! NAVSEA employs a diverse, highly trained, educated, and skilled workforce - from students and entry level employees to experienced professionals and individuals with disabilities. We support today's sophisticated Navy and Marine Corps ships, aircraft, weapon systems and computer systems. We are continuously looking for engineers, scientists, IT and cyber specialists, as well as trade and other support professionals to ensure the U.S. Navy can protect and defend America. Please contact NSWC Crane Human Resources at crane_recruiting@navy.mil.