Acuity Technologies

Founded in 1992, Acuity Technologies develops, manufactures, and supports specialized unmanned aerial systems for defense and commercial applications. Experts in aerodynamics, propulsion systems and in-house design and fabrication, Acuity offers flight test capabilities to provide complete UAS life-cycle services. With capabilities for customized vehicles from single prototypes to production quantities, Acuity provides operational support and navigation capabilities, including GPS-denied operation, low-level terrain and structure avoidance, and video-based waypoint and target matching software and remote 3D visualization.

Acuity is also creating imaging systems and software for video navigation and three dimensional shape, terrain, and indoor environment capture. This includes equipment and software with full shape and color capability, and we are bringing this technology into industrial, marketing, and embedded applications. Dedicated hardware accelerators for video rate structure and motion processing can capture over one million surface points in a single optical flash, taking microsecond 3D snapshots of objects.

By combining these technologies, Acuity is developing new navigation capabilities for UASs, including navigation in GPS-denied situations, low-level terrain and structure avoidance, and waypoint and target matching.

UAV / UAS

Conventional aircraft design and test cycles are no longer able to keep up with the rapid change of pace in avionics, propulsion, sensors, communications, and materials technologies. By integrating existing subsystems with innovative designs which plan for the future generations of components, Acuity quickly and effectively proves air vehicle concepts including airfames, ground stations, sensors, and diverse payloads.


3D Terrain and Environment Capture

Acuity's sensors group is creating imaging systems and software for video navigation and 3 dimensional shape, terrain, and indoor environment capture. This includes equipment and software with full shape and color capability. Dedicated hardware accelerators for on-line inspection and video-rate and faster structure and motion processing are also in development. Our projected pattern photogrammetry systems can capture milions of points of complex surface information in a single optical flash, taking microsecond 3D snapshots of objects in motion and removing the need for targets used in conventional photogrammetry.

The bottleneck in the availability of 3D material for autonomous vehicle navigation and for human and machine analysis, presentation, and interaction is the acquisition of 3D models from real world environments and objects. If accurate, photorealistic renditions can be automatically created with freely moving cameras this bottleneck can be removed. Applications for these models can be found in manufacturing and natural resources utilization, in forensics, in training and simulation, in modeling and navigation by unmanned vehicles, in product presentation and evaluation, in AEC as-built capture and new structure design, and in medical diagnostics and procedures. Acuity is bringing this technology into industrial, marketing, and embedded applications.

Lead Technical Staff

Robert Clark
President

Robert received his BS Summa cum Laude from Princeton University in Aerospace Engineering in 1982 and MS in Digital Control Systems from Stanford University's Aeronautics and Astronautics department in 1983. He then spent several years as a software and electronics engineering consultant specializing in control systems. He has been Principal Investigator on development contracts in sensor systems and aeronautical design and UAV construction and flight test.

Patents
'Cyclogyro Propulsion and Control"
, pending
US Patent 5,309,212 “Scanning Rangefinder with Range to Frequency Conversion”
US Patent 5,585,786 “Optical Tank-Level Gauge”
US Patent 5,648,844 “Laser Liquid Level Gauge with Diffuser”
US Patent 5,904,870 “Laser Lens Heater”
US Patent 6,624,889 “Triangulation Displacement Sensor”

Publications
R. Clark, M. Lin, C. Taylor, “3D Environment Capture from Monocular Video and Inertial Data,” Electronic Imaging, January 2006.

R. Clark, “A Laser Distance Measurement Sensor for Industry and Robotics”, Sensors, 6/94

R. Clark, “Optical Distance Measurement Sensor”, Measurements and Control, 10/93

Chinmay Patel
Aerospace Research Engineer

Dr. Patel performs aircaft and flight control system design and development at Acuity. He received his Doctorate and Master's from Stanford University's Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics with research in energy extraction from atmospheric turbulence to reduce/eliminate propulsion requirements for small UAVs. His work included analysis and design of control laws for energy extraction from atmospheric turbulence using stochastic optimization techniques and flight tests conducted on a custom-made UAV and autopilot for validation. He is the recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship (SGF), Stanford University’s highest financial award to graduate students.

Book

Chinmay Patel, Energy Extraction from Atmospheric Turbulence to Improve Aircraft Performance, VDM Verlag, 2008.

Conference Presentations and Technical Publications

Lissaman, P. B. S., Patel, C. K. [2007], Neutral Energy Cycles for a Vehicle in Sinusoidal and
Turbulent Vertical Gusts, AIAA paper 2007-0863. 45th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and
Exhibit, Reno, NV.

Patel, C. K., Kroo, I. M. [2006], Control Law Design for Improving UAV Performance Using Wind
Turbulence, AIAA paper 2006-0231. 44th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, Reno, NV.

Rakow, A., Patel C. K. et. al. [2004], Design, Analysis, Manufacturing and Testing of a Composite
Smart-Bridge, SAMPE Journal, Vol. 40, No. 5. Member of the manufacturing team for Stanford
University's winning entry in the 2004 SAMPE Bridge Design Competition, Long Beach, CA.

Patel, C. K., Arya, H., Sudhakar, K. [2002], Design, Build and Fly a Solar Powered Aircraft,
Presented at the International Seminar and Annual General Meeting of the Aeronautical Society of
India, Goa, India.

Charles Guo
Staff Scientist

Dr. Guo works in Acuity's video processing group on reconstruction of 3D environment models from video streams. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2004 in Statistical Image Modeling, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision. He has performed research in, and developed software using, Generative/ Descriptive/ Discriminative image modeling, Bayesian Modeling and Inference, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computing, ML/MAP estimation, HMM, EM, wavelets. and other methods. Prior to joining Acuity he worked as a research scientist at Vidient Systems, Sunnyvale, CA on Intelligent Video Surveillance/Analytics, including GMM background modeling, shadow and reflection detection, CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) object detection and recognition, SVM object recognition, Mean-shift tracking, Blob-based tracking, optical flow, and Event Extraction from Videos.

Publications

Book Chapters:

Ying Nian Wu, Cheng-en Guo, and Song-Chun Zhu, “Perceptual Scaling”, Applied Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference from an Incomplete Data Perspective, Ed. Gelman and Meng, John Wiley, 2004.

Journal Articles:
Ying Nian Wu , Song-Chun Zhu, and Cheng-en Guo, “From Information Scaling of Natural Images to Regimes of Statistical Models”, Quarterly of Applied Mathematics

Cheng-en Guo, Song-Chun Zhu, and Ying Nian Wu, “Primal Sketch: Integrating Structure and Texture” Computer Vision and Image Understanding

Song-Chun Zhu, Cheng-en Guo, Yizhou Wang, and Zijian Xu, “What are Textons?”,
International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 62, No. 1-2, pp.121-143, April-May 2005.

Cheng-en Guo, Song-Chun Zhu, and Ying Nian Wu,
“Modeling Visual Patterns by Integrating Descriptive and Generative Methods”, International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp.5-29, June 2003.

Jiebo Luo and Cheng-en Guo, “Perceptual Grouping of Segmented Regions in Color Images”,
Pattern Recognition, vol. 36, no. 12, pp.2781-2792, December 2003.

Conference Articles:

Cheng-en Guo, Ying Nian Wu, and Song-Chun Zhu, “Information Scaling Laws in Natural Scenes”, Proceedings of 2nd Workshop on Generative Model Based Vision, Washington DC, 2004.

Cheng-en Guo, Song-Chun Zhu and Ying Nian Wu, “Towards a Mathematical Theory of Primal Sketch and Sketchability”, Proc. of 9th International Conference on Computer Vision, pp.1228-1235, Nice, France, 2003.

Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu and Cheng-en Guo, “Statistical Modeling of Image Sketch”, Proc. of 7th European Conf. on Computer Vision, pp.240-254, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2002.

Cheng-en Guo, Song-Chun Zhu and Ying Nian Wu, “Visual Learning by Integrating Descriptive and Generative Models”, Proc. of 8th Int’l Conf. on Computer Vision, vol.1 pp. 370-377, Vancouver, Canada, 2001.

Song-Chun Zhu and Cheng-en Guo, “Conceptualization and Modeling of Visual Patterns - A Modern Statistical Physics Foundation for Visual Complexity”, Proc. of Third Workshop on Perceptual Organization in Computer Vision, Vancouver, Canada, 2001.

Song-Chun Zhu and Cheng-en Guo, “Mathematical Modeling of Clutter: descriptive vs. generative models”, Proc. of SPIE AeroSense Conf. on Automatic Target Recognition, Orlando, FL, 2000.

Kevin Ciocia
Lead Mechanical Engineer

Mr. Ciocia is the lead mechanical engineer on air vehicle and sensor systems at Acuity. His work here has included developing advanced propulsion concepts and designing and testing engine and rotor prototypes. He also led a team that placed in the top four nationally in the SAE Supermileage Vehicle Competition four years running, and developed the digitally controlled fuel injected engine for the car. Mr. Ciocia holds Bachelor's degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Robert Davidson
Hardware Engineer

Mr. Davidson provides engineering support, for propulsive, mechanical, and avionics system layout and installation computer on Acuity's prototype vehicles and sensor systems. Before joining Acuity he was a Field Engineer for Panasonic Avionics System Corp assigned to United Air Lines at SFO. In his naval career Robert served as a weapons system integrator, maintenance personnel trainer, and P3 Orion aircrew sensor operator and in-flight technician, with over 4300 flight hours. He is experienced in all P3-A/B and -C systems including electrical, avionics, hydraulic, instrumentation, cryptographics, and signaling.