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New research lab to help develop military technology
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
A new research lab in north Dayton will help develop military technology through a collaboration of Wright State University, private companies and the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Tec^Edge Works at 105 Janney Road opened Tuesday, June 3, with a $3 million operating budget for five years. It will be the production partner of Tec^Edge Innovation and Collaboration Center in Riverside, said chief operating officer Jim Leftwich of the Dayton Development Coalition.
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"They'll take the new conceptual designs from Riverside and bring them here to make prototypes to test and evaluate," Leftwich said. "Then they'll be able to make corrections and adjustments to come up with solutions to the war planners' needs."
A key project at Tec^Edge involves unmanned aerial vehicles with sensor packages, Wright Brothers Institute director Bart Barthelemy said. Remote-controlled drones, as UAVs are called, have been used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for both surveillance and shooting weapons.
Barthelemy's nonprofit institute developed both the new center and the Riverside facility, which boasts of supporting the work of more than 4,430 collaborators since it opened in January 2007. It facilitates partnerships among government, academia and industry.
Wright State's Research Institute will manage the laboratory and contribute to its operation, along with Dayton Development Coalition and City of Dayton. It cost $300,000 to refurbish the 24,000-square-foot laboratory from what had been the Central Fasteners plant.
"The center will to be an important source of new research jobs and an incubator of commercial technologies which will foster economic development," Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin said.
How many jobs, which technologies and how much economic development are not known, Leftwich said.
"We haven't made a job estimate," he said. "This is part of building an infrastructure that helps the region capture more of the research work done by the Air Force."
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2129 or klamb@DaytonDailyNews.com.
