Army business solution accelerates collaborative drone defense research

ADELPHI, Md. – A forward-thinking business solution employed by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory enabled Army researchers and university partners to rapidly launch a joint research effort to improve counter uncrewed aerial systems.

In April, ARL became the first Army organization to join the Streamlined, Multisite, Accelerated Resources for Trials Institutional Review Board, a national public-private initiative that allows member institutions to streamline the preliminary review process for joint human subjects research while maintaining the high integrity of the evaluation process.

Enrolling in the SMART IRB program greatly reduces the time it takes for the Army to execute partnerships with academic collaborators on studies that involve human participants, accelerating the pace of mission-relevant research. ARL promptly leveraged its newfound membership to accelerate the research approval process for a collaborative research effort with the University of Texas at Arlington.

The research uses virtual reality to investigate how best to design heads-up display elements to convey location and movement of UASs in extended reality, and access to the SMART IRB enabled the team to cut the administrative and review process time from multiple weeks to two days.

“Thanks to ARL’s early participation in the SMART IRB, ARL’s researchers will be able to work with institutions much more quickly than we have in the past,” said Theresa Straut, ARL Human Protections director and the driving force behind the effort to register ARL in the SMART IRB. “This strategy makes ARL and the Army more competitive. New collaborators will be more excited to work with us, because they know that we are taking proactive measures to reduce their administrative burden.”

The SMART IRB initiative has existed since 2016, but the option for U.S. Department of War agencies to join was not made available until this year.

Per federal law, non-exempt human subject research must first undergo an Institutional Review Board review, but the IRB review for a joint research effort between the Army and an external partner can take substantially longer to complete due to necessity of obtaining a reliance agreement between the collaborating institutions in compliance with the single IRB mandate.

The joint study that ARL planned with UT Arlington involves human participants detecting UASs and identifying which ones are approaching while in immersive virtual reality. Due to the in-person requirement of its data collection method, the team was confronted with the challenge of the time-consuming reliance agreement process.

“The original reliance agreement we were pursuing was the first between ARL and UT Arlington,” said Dr. Laura Marusich Cooper, ARL research psychologist and the lead behind the joint research effort with UT Arlington. “Because we were using our previous process that was not part of the standard workflow at the university, the agreement review remained ongoing after six weeks. Once we were able to make the request to use the SMART IRB process, however, the university was able to process the agreement within two days, and data collection could begin almost immediately.”

Access to the SMART IRB allowed ARL to streamline the reliance agreement process by leveraging the framework that UT Arlington, a fellow SMART IRB member, had already established and successfully implemented.

“For this project, SMART IRB provided a practical and efficient path for establishing reliance between our institutions,” said Lisa Greening, the director of the Office of Regulatory Services at UT Arlington. “What was becoming a complex administrative process was simplified through SMART IRB, allowing us to focus on supporting the research collaboration and move the study forward more quickly.”

Now that ARL belongs to a coalition of almost 5,000 member institutions that have all agreed to use the same reliance agreement, external partners can overcome this administrative hurdle as well to perform collaborative research more quickly with the Army.

“Obtaining fast access to the SMART IRB is a big win for ARL and the Army, because we’ve made mission-critical collaborative research much more convenient for our external partners,” Straut said. “The progress that we’ve already made with this initiative shows that ARL is committed to leveraging all of its capabilities, both scientific and business, to support the warfighter and transform the Army.”

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DEVCOM ARL is the Army’s sole fundamental research laboratory serving as the nexus of science between the military, academia and industry. Operating under U.S. Army Futures and Concepts Command and the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command, ARL executes globally recognized research to accelerate delivery of war-winning, disruptive technologies for tomorrow’s Army.

For information, visit theArmy Research Laboratory website.

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