Warren Harrison (PI), Jim Larson and I (co-PIs) recently got a nice grant from the National Institutes of Justice to do some police car radio work…
The basic premise is that the current police handheld "packset" radios are somewhat suboptimally used. The packsets transmit voice to a relay station, typically many miles distant. Since the packsets are of necessity low power for battery and safety reasons, this is unreliable; many officers carry cellphones as a backup, which has obvious problems of its own. Further, since the packset isn't talking to the police car, it can't have any effect on the car or its contents.
Hence our plan. We have the packset run not to relay, but to the police car. We relay through the car's 500W radio, giving us much better signal. (We have even better plans for this which I'll talk about in the future.) Further, the in-car laptop Mobile Data Terminal (MDT) monitors the link, and can pick up voice commands and interpret them. Thus, the officer can check a license plate number, lock the car doors and the like from a distance just by speaking into the packset.
That's the theory, at least. We've developed some really primitive initial prototypes of this system. Over the next year, we'll try to turn them into a production-quality solution. We will open-source/open-hardware as much of our work as is technically feasible; the hardware cost should be extremely low, as most of the system can use existing legacy equipment. We hope that folks other than law enforcement and emergency services will pick up our work and help out as well, as is the open source way.
PI Harrison is just stepping down as the Editor of IEEE Software Magazine, but by night he's a sworn officer with the Clackamas County Sherriff's office and drives around in a police car busting bad guys. As you can imagine, he's an invaluable resource, and is really excited about the work. I think it will go well. (B)