Zebra Zapper: How We Helped Kill Mussels with IIoT Digital Twins

Trident Defense Systems is a specialized team within Trident Research that is focused on environmental and critical infrastructure protection solutions pioneering.

Trident Research is a specialist engineering firm specializing in serving the United States military with services and technologies such as their acoustic scoring solution for U.S. and allied militaries that accurately scores live fire weapons in broad ocean areas.

We partnered with the Trident Defense Systems (TDS) team to speed up their time-to-market on Zebra Zapper, providing IIoT hardware/software, enterprise-grade private cellular connectivity, and a command and control (C2) web application on AWS for real-time monitoring and control of the IIoT devices in the field.

Customer Challenges & Goals

TDS came to us with the need for a lower-cost, scalable, reliable, and secure full-stack solution across hardware, connectivity, and web application development to bring their product vision to reality.

TDS had the following core objectives when they came to our team:

• They were trying to avoid a full electronics design and manufacturing lifecycle for the hardware side of the product.
• They needed to ensure that they had a low complexity yet enterprise-grade private cellular connection to the IIoT devices for reliable real-time C2 signaling, since the use case was for critical infrastructure protection (electrical and water infrastructure).
• They needed a purpose-built web application that could provide the real-time C2 and monitoring interface for the IIoT devices.

Solution Details

To meet the full-stack needs of TDS' new Zebra Zapper product, we brought our full-stack solutions across IIoT hardware/software, private cellular connectivity, and custom web application development.

IIoT Platform Solution

For the IIoT hardware and software solution, we implemented the open architecture building and industrial automation controllers that we distribute and integrate, with light modifications to some of the I/O to tune them to TDS' product needs.

By focusing on tuning an already proven open and graphically-programmable IIoT platform instead of building from scratch, we saved TDS a massive amount of time, provided a highly optimized price point, and let them focus on the unique elements (weaponized zebra mussel killing RF magic) of their product.

Private Cellular Connectivity

Remote connectivity was a key need for the project, and it had to be performant, secure, configurable, and highly-available to ensure proper management of the IIoT devices protecting critical infrastructure. It also had to avoid requiring expensive and slow-to-implement contracts with larger Mobile Network Operators, while still delivering carrier-grade ownership of the network.

We delivered on the connectivity need by utilizing the next generation private mobile networking solutions from Expeto, in a dedicated AWS environment that we managed for TDS. We are a partner and integrator of the Expeto platform.

This private cellular/mobile network deployment gave TDS carrier-grade control and traffic ownership for the mission critical IIoT connectivity.

Digital Twin Web Application

To meet the C2 web application needs, we utilized the Ruby on Rails framework to build a Digital Twin application that utilized the private cellular connectivity layer to enable real-time bi-directional communication between the C2 web app and the IIoT devices.

By utilizing our Ruby on Rails reference architecture in their own AWS account (which we managed for them), TDS gained the efficiency and simplicity of a SaaS solution while retaining ownership and custody of data, performance, and security.

Furthermore, we used some of the advanced networking solutions offered by AWS, such as PrivateLink, public and private hosted zones in Route53, and the EC2 internal DNS resolution service to ensure critical C2 traffic never transited the public Internet.

Instead of using something like a VPN tunnel over the Internet, the IIoT devices utilized the private cellular network that terminated in the AWS account VPC network, to communicate with the Digital Twin web application. Meanwhile, users that needed to access the web application for C2 and monitoring from the public Internet could do so thanks to the public side of the Route 53 zone and AWS Application Load Balancer, all on the same domain.

Customer Success

Our collaboration with TDS was a success, with successful proof-of-concept deployments in the field, and the time and cost optimization they were looking for.

Zebra Zapper is a unique product that provides a non-chemical solution to the Zebra and Quagga mussel problem affecting critical infrastructure.

The team at TDS are continuing to refine the specialized side of Zebra Zapper to introduce more scalability, and we're looking forward to assisting with future iterations of the project.