18-month effort will mature the On-Demand Regional Intelligent Operations Network from prototype to operational demonstration in New York’s Adirondack region
ResilienX, Inc has been selected for a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II award to advance its On-Demand Regional Intelligent Operations Network (ORION). The award funds an 18-month program to develop and demonstrate a scalable system for coordinating autonomous and semi-autonomous uncrewed aircraft during wildfire response, disaster management, and emergency operations.
Today’s wildfire and disaster operations rely on fragmented, single-platform drone deployments and manual coordination across agencies, which limits situational awareness during time-critical incidents. ORION addresses this gap with a hardware-agnostic orchestration and data integration layer that connects drones, sensors, communications, command-and-control, and mission intelligence into a single operational system. It delivers a shared Common Operational Picture and maintains resilient operations in communications-degraded environments under a human-on-the-loop model.
Under the Phase II award, ResilienX will mature ORION from Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 to TRL 7. The effort integrates Vigilare AI’s TitanOps platform, Hoplynk’s resilient edge networking, cooperative airspace sensing, Pierce Aerospace’s Remote ID sensor, and OneSky’s UAS Service Supplier (USS) platform. Two operational demonstrations in the Adirondack region of New York will be supported by NUAIR’s flight test infrastructure and regulatory expertise.
The work supports NASA priorities across the Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) project, the Airspace Operations and Safety Program, the Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign, and System-Wide Safety research. ResilienX identifies follow-on opportunities spanning NASA Langley, Project ULTRA, and FEMA engagement, targeting a serviceable market across more than 300 U.S. metropolitan areas.
“Living in Colorado, I’ve seen firsthand what wildfires do to communities and to the responders who protect them, and that’s what makes this work personal for me. I’m proud to lead ORION into Phase II and turn what we proved in Phase I into a real capability that helps responders make faster, better-informed decisions,” said Andrew Foster, ORION Principal Investigator and Product Manager at ResilienX.
