“Under my guidance, the students will be doing most of the software development,” says Amar Raheja, who has been teaching computer graphics courses for the last six years.

Staying safe and saving lives, that's the first mission for firefighters no matter what the emergency is, says Lonnie Morris. “Ask firefighters anywhere, and they’ll tell you that’s the No. 1 priority.” And, entering a building for an emergency provides unique safety challenges because personnel may not be visible to each other inside the structure, nor are they visible to the team outside.

Anaheim-based L3 Interstate Electronics Corporation (IEC) has created a solution to this problem with GPS sensors that work indoors. Previously, GPS signals were useful strictly outdoors because they required an unblocked transmission to a number of satellites to triangulate the GPS sensors’ positions.

“We had complaints from the military that they need to be able to track people inside buildings where our traditional GPS receiver doesn’t work,” says Morris, director of advanced technology for business development with IEC, an industry leader with more than 10,000 of its GPS receivers in use in Iraq and Afghanistan. “When they go into buildings, they have the same problem as firefighters. So, when we heard that Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency also identified this as an immediate problem that had to be solved, we proposed a solution,” Morris says.

IEC developed a system comprised of sensors about the size of a cell phone, which are carried by the firefighters. The sensors relay information to each other and allow the IEC’s patented algorithms to calculate each user’s position without the need of sensors installed in the buildings. Information is also sent to a computer to be viewed by personnel such as a fire chief at a remote command center. The company’s system, the Integrated GPS Indoor Navigation Technology, won the support of a $1.8 million Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency contract to create working prototypes.

The project led IEC to Cal Poly Pomona’s computer science department — with its emphasis on visualization-software development — for creation of this software. For the program to be most effective, the people in charge of an emergency back at the command post need to be able to look at a screen and see exactly where all of the personnel are located within a building and interact with the program intuitively.

“We have a number of engineers at IEC, including our president, Robert Huffman, who are Cal Poly Pomona graduates, and we have become familiar with the school’s GIS labs and know they have experience in creating this type of software,” says Morris. “To be honest, we also know that we are going to need employees in this area for years to come, so we figured we should help students develop these skills since they may eventually be working for us.”

Amar Raheja is an associate professor of computer science at Cal Poly Pomona, and while the contract with IEC to develop this program is a considerable honor and a testament to the department’s quality research, he sees it primarily as an extraordinary opportunity for the students. “Under my guidance, the students will be doing most of the software development,” says Raheja, who has been teaching computer graphics courses for the last six years. The department also offers game programming courses that heavily use computer graphics principles. “In our graphics courses, we require one big project with a 3-D component, but in this case, it’s not creating a game. The information that would be fed into this program would be live GPS coordinate data in real time.”

While the ultimate application will be a matter of saving lives, the process of creating the software is a computer graphic engineer’s dream come true, admits Raheja.

“Fortunately, the city of Anaheim’s fire department is one of very few in the nation that has digitized most of their building schematics, so we are able to start with those building models and create a visualization program on the screen that allows a fire captain at the command post to see where his firefighters are in the building, which floor they are on and whether the person is immobile, in a panic, etc.”

The next step in the program, according to both Raheja and Morris is to develop software for fire departments that do not have their city’s floor plans digitized.

“Our GPS sensors can tell you where a person is within three feet. We can tell how many floors they’ve climbed and how far inside the building they are. We just won’t be able to see where the walls are,” says Morris. The system may also be used for SWAT teams, police and on emergency vehicles.

“We have demonstrated the basic capability of the system, and we now have to build it in a way that’s affordable, ergonomically useful and easy to understand in the field,” says Morris. “This is a long-term program that will likely go beyond 2014, and as it grows, the industry will need the expertise of people like the students of Cal Poly Pomona who have worked on this program.”