About
Ambient Control Systems Inc. has a successful track record of developing battery-free energy collection, storage and management systems for use in remote, outdoor environments. Ambient’s patented photovoltaic technology converts light to energy over a wide range of light conditions and stores the energy in a non-battery based medium, such as ultra capacitors or super capacitors. This experience has given Ambient the expertise to harvest and store the maximum available energy to power remote operations for periods exceeding 20 years under severe environmental conditions of temperature, pressure and shock.
Ambient has incorporated this technology into a number of successful commercial products for applications in irrigation control. Ambient’s LEIT range of battery-free irrigation controllers activate and deactivate irrigation valves using soil moisture sensors. They have been successfully deployed internationally for over 16 years. Under an exclusive license agreement with the DIG Corporation, Ambient sold this product arm in 2001.
Military Power Systems – As a research and development company, focused on developing long-term, efficient energy harvesting and storage technologies, Ambient continues to explore opportunities to develop new applications for its energy management technology.
More so today than ever before, there is an increased emphasis on the deployment of remote sensing systems in commercial and military applications, particularly for persistent surveillance.
In military applications, considerable advances in sensor technology have accompanied this trend. However, military missions dependent upon remote sensing systems have often been compromised or limited in duration due to their reliance on batteries, which are short-lived and unreliable, particularly under the extreme environmental conditions which characterize numerous theatres of operation.
Through a number of government contract awards, Ambient’s engineering team have been able to develop a series of energy harvesting products to replace conventional battery systems:
- ALPC – a ruggedized, covert, 20 year lived, ultra-capacitor based power system for Special Operational Forces
- NEPAL – a similar generation of systems designed specifically for the US Army
- IPAL – a commercialized variant of these same products for border sensor applications with homeland security opportunities
Event Management and Mitigation – Commercial applications for remote sensing have been slower to develop. However, there is now a growing concern surrounding the increasing frequency and severity of catastrophic environmental events. With the apparent rise in wildfires, floods, seismic and tsunami events and with rapidly escalating event mitigation costs that are straining available budgets, agencies and municipalities are seeking ways in which to effectively combat these growing threats.
It all begins with Ambient’s next generation FireALERT , the FireALERT MK II product line. This product is poised to introduce persistent surveillance into the commercial arena by providing a real time wildfire detection and mitigation capability. The approach taken by Ambient will provide a system of systems approach that will detect the outbreak or approach of a wildfire into a monitored area, then map and track the wildfire event in real time while making this information available through our new Event Management and Mitigation Platform (EMMP) to emergency managers, whether located in an operations center or in the field.
In this rapidly developing field, Ambient’s new EMMP software product offering is designed to provide the emergency manager with real time situational awareness of an event from its inception, through its evolution to its resolution. Through its command and control heritage, born out of DoD funding for Force Protection Command and Control, EMMP also drives the mitigation activity for event resolution, placing and tracking response assets throughout the event cycle, supporting suppression activation and initiating emergency notification.
EMMP is built on an open architecture framework and using a system of system approach, EMMP’s flexible design supports rapid development and deployment of new software components whilst future proofing its core design.
EMMP is a suite of situational awareness software that provides access to and display of real time information, unified into a single, highly focused Common Operational Picture for:
- fire detection
- fire perimeter mapping and tracking
- remotely activated structural suppression triggering
- automatic vehicle location display
- geographic information system map overlay display
- pre-plan display
- meteorological information display
- emergency event notification and messaging
EMMP’s supporting hardware components are comprised of:
- the FireALERT MK II wildfire detection system and components
- the ActALERT series of remotely triggered suppression activation systems
- the HomeALERT series of FM broadcast emergency notification products
- the SonicALERT series of siren control systems
Areas of Application – Our technology, products and services are suitable for private or commercial institutions (hotels, schools, hospitals, university campuses etc.) as well as for all markets associated with natural disasters.