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With a new partnership and a pending product release into a new industry, precision motion technology developer InterSense Inc. of Bedford is taking an aggressive approach to weathering the economic downturn.
In what officials feel could be a seminal deal for the 40-person company, InterSense last week struck a partnership with Israeli military training system developer BVR Systems Inc. with the aim of developing a personal location, tracking and monitoring device for firefighters and other first-responder personnel.
Dubbed the First Responders Independent Navigation Device, the project aims to develop a way to track emergency workers on a given site without the help of GPS. In the case of firefighters, for example, the system would allow directors on sight, or at a central location, to “see” where firefighters are located within a building, regardless of floor, and in environments not friendly to GPS, such as urban areas.
The project is being funded by the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation, an economic development group sponsored by the U.S. and Israel, which helps develop research and development cooperation between companies in the U.S. and companies in Israel. While the BIRD Foundation invests about $11 million per year in such relationships, according to officials, the exact amount of funding for the InterSense project was not disclosed.
For InterSense, the deal has possibilities beyond pure technology development, according to CEO T.C. Browne.
“The funding is enough to get it to prototype stages, but it really isn’t enough to bring it fully to market,” he said. So the two companies will look at spinning out a new business unit once the product is up and running.
Officials expect a commercial product to be ready by late 2010. “We think this could be a big market for us,” said InterSense vice president Mike Donfrancesco.
The idea of providing first responders with tracking capabilities is similar to a project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which landed a $430,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last October.
“This is an absolutely critical need,” said WPI professor William Michalson. “Right now, the systems that are in place are very crude. Its like (firefighters) are using 18th century equipment to solve 21st century problems.”
But even as the company works on its military and civilian technology, which represents about 60 percent of its business, according to Donfrancesco, InterSense is also branching into new markets.
Last summer, the company developed a camera system that uses motion sensing technology to allow for real-world filming in a virtual environment. The product, called V-Cam, has garnered attention from the feature film market — it has been used in a handful of movies, including two Robert Zemeckis animated films — and now the company is taking that technology to the gaming world and will unveil a version aimed at virtual games at the Game Developers Conference later this month in San Francisco.
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