Initiatives Review Magazine - February 2011 Harrison Diamond |  |
In the deep, dark catacombs of the Sago mine in West Virginia, 13 miners were trapped after a methane explosion. With precious time and oxygen quickly running out, rescue workers were scrambling to locate the miners. Unfortunately, they arrived too late for all but one of the 13 miners. Sago was one of the deadliest mine disasters in West Virginia in decades. The lack of information and spatial awareness of the miners proved to be fatal. “I had a retired miner come up to me after the event. He told me that if they had our technology they could have saved eight of the miners instead of just one,” recollects Stephen Werner, COO of Q-Track.  | | |
Q-Track is a locally owned company that has developed technology that is tantamount to GPS for indoors as Jerry Gabig, the company’s President and Co-founder, likes to say. The technology is based upon discoveries by Dr. Hans Schantz, the company’s vice president for R&D. Schantz’s Near Field Electromagnetic Ranging (NFER) technology is based upon the use of low frequency radio (RF) waves. Q-Track’s technology uses low frequency RF waves as a means of measuring distances with accuracy within a range of a couple of feet. This characteristic of waves is markedly different from other technologies used to measure distance. More commonly used approaches to measurement focus on the time it takes to reach a destination or using the relative strength of a signal. Neither of these ways works accurately in cluttered environments such as a house or a mine. The NFER technology is able to go where neither of these two approaches can and still be accurate. The technology the company has developed appears to have limitless applications. “The fun part about this company is that you never know how people are going to use our product,” Gabig says. Q-Track was founded in 2002 by colleagues of a Huntsville-based company. After discovering Schantz’s findings, the company’s founders realized they had a potential product on their hands. The company has since grown to 21 employees and is a graduate of Biz Tech, Huntsville’s high-tech business incubator. Q-Track has tested the technology in a variety of fields. One promising application appears to be for firefighters searching for victims trapped in a burning building. The Q-Track system uses a series of receivers outside a building that link with a medallion-like transmitter worn around the firefighter’s neck. The receiver and the transmitter communicate with each other and create a path of where the firefighter has travelled once inside the building. During a recent test of the product, Werner said that firefighters who used the technology took half as long to discover a missing rescuer than those without the technology. In a life or death situation, those minutes add up. But beyond mining and fire rescue, the technology is equally applicable to logistics and workplace safety.
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One application is the operation of warehouses such as those that support automotive manufacturing plants. When the plant is running short of parts, it orders the parts from the warehouse. In most warehouses, pallets are identified when they enter the warehouse and when they depart. The record of the pallet’s location in the warehouse is made by forklift operators and is subject to human error. In large warehouses used to support automotive manufacturing, it is not uncommon for a pallet to be misplaced. Q-Track’s NFER technology provides an inexpensive solution to automatically and accurately record the location of pallets without having forklift operators manually record the location. Q-Track’s technology can assist with lean process improvements by making a record of the movements of employees. The paths traveled by employees can be analyzed to remove inefficiencies. Industrial safety is another application for this technology. As manufacturing becomes more and more automated and less reliant upon humans, dangers in the workplace can develop. Robotic cranes lifting heavy supplies are usually equipped with a laser that determines if anything is in proximity, says Gabig. “The lasers are not very effective because they can’t distinguish between someone not being in the way and someone just bending over to tie their shoes. Our technology acts like a shield. The robot knows not to move if someone is within a certain distance of it,” he said. Q-Track’s technology is drawing attention from several sources. The company has earned major funding from such government entities as the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, DARPA, and others. In late 2010, the company earned second place honors in the West Coast Global Security Challenge. According to the Global Security Challenge, Q-Track has joined “the ranks of our previous finalists and winners who have raised over $78 million in fresh capital via our competitions and challenges.” Clearly, Q-Track is on track for growth. One doesn’t need a GPS to figure that out. Full Text Initiatives Review Magazine Website AL.com
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