CRG teamed with Battle Sight Technologies to develop and mass produce a special crayon for warfighters, first responders and disaster-relief workers.
Dubbed CrayTac, this device allows troops to write messages or draw complex figures on walls, sidewalks and other surfaces. The markings are invisible except to someone wearing night-vision goggles. Troops can use CrayTac to mark vehicles and other equipment so they can be identified in low- or no-light situations. It also can be used in place of a glow stick to mark a room as cleared.
To achieve Battle Sight’s longer-term goals, it needed more manufacturing capacity, prompting them to team with CRG. The collaboration ultimately resulted in Battle Sight gaining enough production capacity to shift from building CrayTacs by hand to making them in large batches. CRG’s improvements to manufacturing included formulation changes as well as novel process development.
In 2019, the Air Force SBIR program awarded a Phase II contract for this project. The funding has allowed Battle Sight and CRG to progress from making CrayTacs by hand to developing the ability to produce hundreds in an hour.