The number of suicide bombings worldwide have increased dramatically in recent years, as authorities struggle to stay ahead of the terrorist practice which is nearly impossible to forecast and rather easy to carry out. Fortunately, an effort spearheaded by an Albuquerque, N.M.-based small business and two national laboratories could help to sense suicide bomb threats before they occur.

R3 Technologies, a disabled veteran-owned radar detection system developer, and several other small businesses are working with scientist JR Russell from the federally funded Sandia National Laboratories to perfect R3’s Concealed Bomb Detector, or CBD-1000, according to a media release from the labs.

The CBD-1000, which has been improved through the R3 Technologies-Sandia National Laboratories partnership for more than two years, spots both metallic and nonmetallic explosives using an X-band radar. Robby Roberson, owner of R3, said the CBD-1000 can detect the nails, ball bearings, glass, rocks, and other hard, sharp materials commonly found in suicide vests.

Though it’s used for such a large job, the CBD-1000 is rather small: it weights roughly 13 pounds and is the size of a cereal box. The detector can be electric or battery powered and functions using embedded software. The CBD-1000 “uses a spread spectrum, stepped, continuous wave radar to bounce a signal off of a person,” according to Sandia. The signals collected are then analyzed by the software to decide if the subject is dangerous.

“If the person is not carrying a threat, the return signal is in the same polarity as when it was transmitted,” Roberson said. “A threat will rotate the polarity of the signal, and it comes back differently.”

For something that performs such a complex task, the CBD-1000 is fairly simple to use. In fact, Sandia said someone unfamiliar to the radar can be taught to operate the CBD-1000 in 30 minutes. Right now, it takes roughly 15 minutes to set up the CBD-1000 and a scan can be conducted from 9 feet away in just over a second.

The need to be so close to a potential threat is dangerous, that’s one reason why the CBD-1000 team is attempting to improve the overall scanning process, according to Roberson.

“We’re working toward an instantaneous scan so a person can be checked while moving through the beam field. And we hope to extend the range to 100 feet,” Roberson said. “We want to take movement out of the equation. People who want to protect their citizens want to detect at a distance, keep the threat away. They want to scan crowds and stop threats before they get too close.”

Though the CBD-1000 was developed by R3, the original technology used by the detector was actually created in the early 2000s by another Albuquerque-based company. Used originally by police as a hand-held, radar-based sensor to determine if a suspect was armed, the technology wasn’t accurate enough, Roberson said.

Roberson and his father eventually started R3 Technologies to pick up where the previous company left off, with the goal of commercialization. They added partners Manual Rangel of APPI, Inc., radar scientist Don McLemore of McLemore Enterprises, Lawrence Sher of Wind Mountain Research Associates, and Julie Seton of Indelible Enterprises. The current team was completed by the addition of Russell and Sandia.

“When JR came onboard we all took a hard look at what we had, what it did and how it worked,” Roberson said. “JR came at this problem from a different point of view. He wanted to know everything about it. He helped us realize we had to go in a completely different direction. We reverse engineered the hardware and software.”

Roberson plans to take the CBD-1000 to market in 2016 at an estimated cost of $50,000. He said several hundred of the units have been produced and that the governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Singapore, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria have expressed interest in the detector.

Sandia National Laboratories is comprised of two United States Department of Energy research and development laboratories. The laboratories are managed by Sandia Corporation, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin.