Innovation Sets Sail at Navy Tech Event

More than 30 technology companies will showcase their products during the 2024 Blue Tech Demo Day partially being held at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division Newport on 29 August.

The daylong event, hosted by NUWC Division Newport’s Northeast Tech Bridge, alongside nonprofit partner 401 Tech Bridge, aims to connect innovative small businesses with U.S. Navy scientists and engineers and Department of Defense stakeholders to facilitate rapid delivery of capabilities to the warfighter.

“The goal of the event is to expose the scientists and engineers from our campus to these small businesses’ innovative technology in a mission-relevant way,” Julie Kallfelz, director of the Northeast Tech Bridge, said. “Each company has technology that is of particular interest to our engineers. This event introduces the companies and their technologies, and then we work to support next steps and further meaningful engagement.”

In-water demonstrations will be completed at operational areas on Narragansett Bay, including at the Division Newport’s Narragansett Bay Test Facility (NTBF). Indoor and in-water presentations will be held at Sail Newport, located at Fort Adams State Park in Newport.

The participating companies will be teaming up to tackle a cross-domain mission, which is to find and characterize an object of interest, exfiltrate that data to the surface and to shore, provide data analysis of that object and determine a course of action. Two teams will launch from the NBTF, and four will depart from Sail Newport. Each group will be assigned one of the three operational areas, and all will execute the same defined mission serially.

When the mission portion of the event is complete, each company will have an opportunity to individually present its capability to an audience of more than 150 people, including representatives from Division Newport, the Office of Naval Research, industry and academia.

The Northeast Tech Bridge 2024 Demo Day is the culmination of smaller technology presentation events that occurred over the past several months and focused on four mission areas — cross-domain communications in March; modeling and simulation/digital twins in April; persistent sensors and monitoring in May; and uncrewed vehicles in June.

Those demonstrations were held virtually at the 401 Tech Bridge office in Middletown, Rhode Island, where a broad cross-section of stakeholders had the opportunity to ask questions. A panel of government and other stakeholders scored the products using a rubric, and the top firms were invited to participate in the Blue Tech Demo Day event.