Aerospace Work

NAVAIR Selects Acuity UAV for Further Development, AIr Launch Test

Menlo Park, CA November 12, 2006 - Acuity's design for a wing and bomb bay launched UAV has been selected by the Naval Air Systems Command for further development and testing. Negotiations on the 2.5 year contact concluded November 8 and work will begin this week.

Acuity's design, a prototype of which was demonstrated in phase 1, was selected from among several competing concepts presented by UAV developers. The design specfications call for a very low drag profile for the aircraft before deployment and a launch speed of up to 275 kt for use with the Navy P3 Orion and the successor Multimission Maritime Aircraft. The UAV will be a multi-use recon, data relay, and persistent observation platform with payload capacity of 250 lb.

Acuity Receives NASA Funding to Develop New VTOL Aircraft Concept

Menlo Park, CA November 22, 2005 - Acuity has received funding for their proposal to build a novel lift-generating mechanism that would enable winged vehicles to perform a Vertical Takeoff with the controllability of a helicopter, with transonic forward speeds.

3D Structure Capture for Engineering Test, Reconaissance, and Navigation

Acuity to Apply 3D Capture Technology to Transonic Wind Tunnel Testing

Menlo Park, CA February 25, 2007 - Following a Phase 1 feasibility demonstration, Acuity's 3D snapshot technology has been chosen for construction and installation in Tunnel 16T at Arnold AFB for for real-time attitude and vibration analysis transonic wind tunnel tests. The proposed system will use Acuity's proprietary projction technology to capture thousands of points on wind tunnel models at up to 40 Hz, and extract and present real time model attitude and deformation information to test engineers.

Acuity Begins Work on 2nd Phase of 3D Model Reconstruction from Monocular Aerial Videos with Eglin AFB

Menlo Park, CA June 1, 2003 - Acuity's algorithms for generating 3D representations of terrain and structures from a video stream have been selected for continued development by Eglin AFB. The work will extend Acuity's phase 1 work on automatic extraction of the shape of terrain, buildings, and other objects viewed from airborne platforms. Video from cameras with zoom lenses and significantly compressed video with associated compression artifacts can be processed and the path of the aircraft and the terrain below are simultaneously reconstructed. In phase 2, the processing speed will be increased and continuous data reduction on the aircraft will be performed, allowing high resolution representations of the terrain to be transmitted over low bandwidth downlinks.

Acuity Begins Work on DARPA/Army Phase 2 Contract to Capture 3D Models from Video

Menlo Park, CA June 21, 2004 - Acuity Technologies' development proposal titled "Sensor Enabled 3D Model Reconstruction from Video" submitted to DARPA has been funded and work has begun. Under the contract Acuity and two subcontractors, ImageCorp and PercepTek, are developing a system for constructing 3D models from digital video taken by a freely moving camera equipped with a MEMs-based inertial measurement unit. Acuity is working with Dr. Thomas Strat, program manager inthe Information Exploitation Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, under funding from the Army Aviation and Missile Command.

Defense applications of the technology include reconnaisance and navigation of urban areas and building interiors, and model construction to support asset position tracking to improve combat situational awareness. Commercial applications include use by real estate agents, resorts, and hotels to create interactive promotional material, and architecture, engineering and construction uses as a tool for capturing scenes and objects for the creation of 3D color models in design software.

In a typical commercial application, transportation engineers planning the addition of an onramp to a freeway interchange would film the interchange with a camera equipped to track its own position and motion. From this, an engineering CAD model would be built, allowing designers to plan and visualiz the changes. As construction progresses, the site can be periodically filmed and compared to plans as part of the project’s quality management.

Other applications for this capability exist in games, simulations, unmanned air and ground vehicle navigation, forensics, forest inventorying and remote medical diagnostics.