SPAWAR device helps keep tabs on school buses

For a mother concerned about her child’s safety during school bus travel, a high-tech device based on Navy engineering know-how might soon offer some comfort.

“Remember the school bus driver in Pennsylvania who decided to take the kids to Washington, D.C.?” asked Bill Bolick, a project engineer at SPAWAR, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center at the Naval Weapons Station here.

“If the schools had this device on board, officials not only could track the bus, they could have stopped the engine and opened the doors.”

The device is an automatic vehicle location unit, or AVL for short. While similar devices are already on the market, Bolick said, they don’t include the features derived from the war on terrorism that Bolick and his team of electronics engineers have designed specifically for school buses.

The Navy’s AVL is built from such components as cell phones, satellite phones, miniature computers and GPS, or global positioning systems that use satellites to pinpoint a unit’s location to within 10 meters.

All of the components are on the market today. The key element, Bolick said, is the integration of these components into a single, “almost stealthy” computer-driven device that fits into a hard plastic carrying case about the size of a large telephone directory.

Here are some of the things Bolick said the AVL can do:
• Track the bus: “It has an on-board GPS receiver that’s hooked to a cell phone. The on-board computer takes the information from the GPS, makes the calculations and relays a running ‘fix,’ or location, over the cell phone back to the base station” located in the school district’s office.

“We ask the cell phone company to provide a regular phone link from their headquarters back to the school” to reduce the chance of a lost cell phone signal, he said.

A satellite phone hookup is also an option, but satellite phones are more expensive than cell phones.

“We’ve made the AVL as innocent-looking as possible and small enough to fit under the driver’s seat. If the driver has an emergency, he can toggle a distress switch,” Bolick said.

When that happens, an alarm goes off at the school district headquarters, the bus’s location flashes on a computer-screen map and the AVL dials up a discrete voice connection over the cell phone. Officials at the school district can listen to whatever is being said on the bus without anyone on the bus knowing.

“We can track the bus, figure out an intercept and alert the police,” Bolick said.

In fact, district officials don’t have to wait for the driver to act. An official at the headquarters can turn on the voice phone if he suspects a problem, such as the bus straying off course.

And if someone on the bus turns off the AVL, the official back at headquarters can turn it back on again.
• Stop the bus: The distress system also can include software that can cut the engine.

“We could track the bus and see when it stops for a stop sign, then shut off the engine and open the doors,” Bolick said. “And we can make it so the driver can’t start it up again.”

When asked, parents and Charleston school administrators seemed excited about the AVL. Their chief concern was cost, but Bolick and the head of a firm that may soon build and market the device insisted it would be “affordable.”

Bolick refused to talk about costs because of ongoing contract negotiations. He said he and other SPAWAR officials are negotiating with the West Paterson, N.J.-based firm of Thorep, North America.

The Navy is prohibited by law from selling the AVL to the public.

But if the government and Thorep sign a contract specifying the device’s design, a Thorep executive said the firm could begin assembling and marketing the AVL by this summer.

Bolick said he and other SPAWAR engineers tested the AVL in the Charleston area on two 15-passenger vans.

Hank Henderson, managing director of Thorep, said his engineers also tested SPAWAR’s AVL in West Paterson a few months ago. He said Thorep will add some options that school districts can purchase if they wish. These include an on-the-bus passenger manifest, a bus-stop announcement device and a computer-based system that parents can dial up on their home PCs to find out if their youngsters are actually on the bus.

Each youngster probably would have to carry an electronic ID card, similar to those used in other security systems, Henderson said. Either the youngster would be asked to swipe the card past a card reader, or the reader could be made sensitive enough to detect the card even if it’s buried in the youngster’s backpack.

The bus-stop announcement feature would be based on the computer’s knowledge of each youngster’s bus stop. A voice would come up on the bus loudspeaker, telling each student when to get off the bus.

“I’m interested,” said Katie McClure, contract administrator for the Charleston County School District. “It has merit and I want to be open-minded, but it would be helpful if we had some grant money to help pay for something like this.”

All 327 of Charleston County’s school buses have an 800 megahertz emergency radio system, and 94 of them have video cameras installed, McClure said. But video cameras don’t provide real-time information. The videos can be viewed only at the end of the day.

Alan Hopkins, a former president of Parents for Public Schools, a local public interest group, said he also was interested in the devices but would want to know more about the costs.

“There are scenarios where it would be welcome,” he said, “but if you had to choose between this and new school buses, I say go for the new buses.”

Asked about costs, Henderson said a lot depends on the options the school districts would want. A “very, very simple system, that just tells where the bus is, could cost under $1,000 for each bus,” he said.

Such systems already are installed on several public and private transportation systems around the nation. A system based on the SPAWAR design “could range from the high two-thousands (of dollars) up to $5,000 each. It depends on how many bells and whistles you want,” Henderson said.