Here in the Boston area we like hard technologies. We like companies with weird names. We like companies that have vision. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Tenebraex, SiOnyx, and MC10.

They are the micro-cluster of imaging tech companies. They are working on a mix of far-out stuff and closer-in products, with a multiple-focus approach that befits their chosen field. If they were superheroes, Tenebraex would have eyes in the back of its head (panoramic view); SiOnyx would see in the dark; and MC10 would morph into different shapes depending on what it was looking at. Taken together, they just might reinvent the cameras we use every day.

One example: Imagine an ultra-thin camera phone that can take high-resolution, wide-angle photos and video in a dimly-lit bar or restaurant, or outside at night. That’s what combining the companies’ capabilities could do—though, as far as I know, they are not working together.

Several months ago I first talked with Peter Jones, the CEO of Scallop Imaging, which is the fastest-growing division of Boston-based optical tech firm Tenebraex. Why am I telling you this now? One, I’ve been busy. Two, Scallop is about to debut its third camera product in September. Last week, Jones said the upcoming “as-yet-unnamed camera will be the industry’s first multi-megapixel panoramic camera for very low light environments.”

Scallop’s new camera follows in the footsteps of its earlier products: digital and analog versions of a device (see photo below) that stitches together images from five separate camera sensors into a 180-degree, distortion-free, high-res panoramic view, for security and surveillance applications. The advantage over traditional fisheye lenses and pan-and-tilt cameras? Image quality, cost, and convenience, Jones said.

Some recent customers include hotels, museums, retail stores, and the U.S. military. One of the more intriguing applications of the technology lies in robotics. Last winter, a U.S. Army research lab organized a contest at Fort Bragg, NC. A number of teams sent mobile robots into a remote area to beam back images—presumably to check out the surroundings without having to send troops in. The robot that used Scallop’s camera finished in the top two (in terms of meeting its objectives), and it was the only one that didn’t get stuck in the woods, Jones said. He attributed the performance in part to its wide field of view.

My colleague Wade first profiled Scallop Imaging back in 2008. Since then, the division has grown to about 50 people. Tenebraex, its parent company, is no flash in the pan either. The company started in 1992 and is profitable, having invested in Scallop “multiple millions” of dollars in research and development, Jones said. “The majority of our future growth will come from Scallop.”

The company’s upcoming low-light camera overlaps a bit with another local firm. … Next Page »

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A couple of startup companies set a world aviation record last night.

But they were pretty low-key about it. As I walked into the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Mukilteo, WA, a half hour north of Seattle, I saw little activity. It was after hours, and the hangar-like building was nearly deserted except for the futuristic planes suspended from the ceiling—Burt Rutan’s “Quickie” and a Beechcraft Starship—and part of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner fuselage on the display floor. It was a bit like “Star Wars” meets “Night at the Museum.”

Tom Nugent, the co-founder and president of Kent, WA-based LaserMotive, greeted me and said they were almost ready for showtime. A small team of engineers divided its attention between the back of a command truck and the adjacent trailer that held the laser optics equipment that would make the show possible. Two German guys who hadn’t slept in days (and were still on Munich time) were sprawled out on deck chairs in front of computer monitors like they were playing a video game. One held a remote controller that he used to guide a “quadrocopter”—a small, 1-kilogram, square-shaped flying contraption with blinking lights and four spinning rotors—made by their company, Ascending Technologies.

Jan Stumpf and Michael Achtelik, the co-CEOs of Ascending Technologies, partnered with LaserMotive to perform this feat last night. The goal: to use a laser to power an aircraft in continuous flight for about 12 hours (far longer than its battery would last without recharging, which is only about five minutes). That would be a world record, by a long shot, for the longest free flight of an electric vehicle.

Indeed, this demonstration is a big deal for the future of electric planes, said Barry Smith, the executive director of the Future of Flight facility. Imagine putting a laser on top of every cellular tower, he said, so that certain types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would never need to land to recharge or refuel. That could potentially revolutionize communications, surveillance, and security and defense applications. Longer term, it could even impact the long-held dream of powering manned aircraft with electricity instead of jet fuel—though that is very far off.

For now, Nugent says, “The significance is we’re going to show this quadrocopter, and any aerial vehicle [of this size], will be able to fly effectively forever. It’s no longer limited by battery capacity.”

LaserMotive has done smaller flight tests before, but not on a free-flying vehicle like this. The company is best known for winning the $900,000 NASA Power Beaming Challenge last year, in one of the levels of the “Space Elevator Games.” That involved using a laser to power a climbing robot up a cable to a certain height (1 kilometer) at a certain speed (about 9 mph). But lately the company has been targeting UAVs as a big commercial application of its wireless power technology. (The next level of the NASA challenge, which was supposed to happen later this year, is still up in the air, so to speak.)

“Goggles on!” someone shouted, and we all complied. That meant the infrared laser, which puts out about 200 watts of light power, was switching on. The beam was directed using a series of mirrors and optics and shot out the top of the trailer. You couldn’t see it with the naked eye except for a reddish halo on the 50-foot ceiling. At the same time, the quadrocopter lifted off (under its own battery power), guided by Stumpf, and floated up to meet the beam, about 30 feet off the ground (see left).

“Not centered,” Nugent said. Then the computer vision system of LaserMotive’s setup kicked in. Software and cameras aligned with the path of the laser beam tracked the vehicle’s position, and positioned the beam so it hit the photovoltaic cells on the underside of the craft; those solar cells transformed the laser’s energy into electricity to continuously charge the quadrocopter’s battery.

With that, all human corrections fell away, and it was just a drone hovering eerily in space, rotors humming quietly. It swayed a few feet from side to side, and the laser tracked it. It was about 7:40 pm.

This is the boring part, Nugent said. And boring is good. Exciting is bad. For the next 12 hours, if all went well, nothing more would happen. The craft would stay up all night (as would the crew), … Next Page »

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Yesterday, we ran the first part of a sit-down interview with Nick Hanauer, a noted entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners. Hanauer, who has been involved in the early stages of such prominent companies as Amazon, aQuantive, and Insitu, spoke about the importance of new metaphors in recognizing and understanding breakthrough ideas; why venture capitalists don’t take enough risks; and the challenges of healthcare reform.

In what follows, Hanauer talks quite a bit more about Amazon, Insitu, and how to think about solving the biggest problems in business and society (hint: don’t conform). He also touches on why he’s generally bored with the online advertising sector (except for Seattle-based Marchex), and the one key area in which he would seek omniscient advice.

Here is part two of our interview:

Xconomy: What are the prospects for another big tech company like Amazon to come out of the Seattle area?

Nick Hanauer: I think the prospects are very good. It’s a very dynamic, creative, and risk-tolerant business culture here. There’s a fabulous ecosystem of people who understand technology in all sorts of ways. There’s software, Internet, biotech, aerospace. Insitu, as an example, is a big company now. And in 10 years, that could be a huge company. I think they employ 600-700 people now. We [Second Avenue Partners] don’t own it anymore, Boeing owns it, sadly. We have as good a shot at creating more big technology companies as almost any place on planet Earth. Probably not as good as Silicon Valley, but better than most places.

X: Tell me more about Second Avenue’s involvement with Bingen, WA-based Insitu, and when you first invested in it. (This company makes unmanned aircraft systems for surveillance and intelligence applications.)

NH: It wasn’t the first round of financing, but they were a teeny tiny company, employed half a dozen people. We looked at it in June or July 2001, and they were like, “Fishing, we’re going to find tuna with cool planes.” We thought it was really interesting technology. [CEO] Steve Sliwa was so good. We got that if they could pull off this technology in this domain, there are an infinite number of applications. And then [September 11, 2001] hit. And we said, oh. The military’s going to buy a lot of these. OK, we’re in. We led that round, and kept on backing them. I’m sad that we sold it, because it was such a civic achievement; it made such a difference in the lives of so many people. It’s maybe the single biggest thing to happen to that region of Washington and Oregon economically in decades. We were very lucky [with the Boeing sale], there was this incredible global bidding war going.

X: How should one learn to think about solving big problems in business and society?

NH: I think the capacity to think creatively isn’t gated by your intellectual abilities so much as your psychological ability to not conform to what other people want you to believe about … Next Page »

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Avaak, the San Diego startup that specializes in ultra low-power wireless video networking technology, says today it has raised $10 million in a Series B round of venture funding led by Qualcomm Ventures, the San Diego chipmaker’s strategic investment arm. Existing investors Trinity Ventures, InterWest Partners, and Leapfrog Ventures joined in the round. The three Silicon Valley VC firms invested about $7 million in Avaak’s first round in 2007.

As I explained last year, Avaak sells a wireless Internet gateway and two small video cameras, which are linked with the gateway through a wireless mesh network, enabling consumers to monitor their homes or businesses remotely. Users can access the real-time video feed via the Internet on their computer or a mobile device.

Avaak co-founder and CEO Gioia Messinger says in a statement released by the company that the additional capital would be used to expand Avaak’s Vue system into retail distribution, and to make further enhancements to the company’s products. Messinger, who is attending the DEMO Spring 2010 conference in Palm Desert, CA, could not be reached for comment earlier today.

Nagraj Kashyap, who is vice president of Qualcomm Ventures (and is also attending the Demo conference), said in a statement, “Avaak has taken video monitoring to a new level of simplicity, allowing consumers to view live video on their mobile devices… Qualcomm is pleased to support Avaak as it enters its next exciting growth phase.”

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NoblePeak Vision of Wakefield, MA, has collected $2 million out of an intended $6.8 million round of equity funding, according to a December 30 regulatory filing. Founded in 2002 by Bell Labs veterans and formerly known as Noble Device Technologies, the company makes shortwave infrared imaging sensors used in night-vision security cameras for surveillance at airports, seaports, border zones, and other settings.

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Bingen, WA-based Insitu, a developer of unmanned aircraft systems, announced today it has received a one-year, $30 million contract from the Canadian government to provide technologies to support Canadian forces’ operations in Afghanistan. The contract, which includes two additional one-year options, specifically calls for small unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Insitu was acquired by Boeing (NYSE: BA) for about $400 million last summer.

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San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders has referred to SPAWAR, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, as one of the city’s best kept secrets, and I started to understand why during a presentation yesterday at San Diego’s Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.

SPAWAR is a major Navy procurement agency, with a total budget of more than $2.4 billion in fiscal 2008. About 65 percent of that supports industry partnerships, which includes spending to acquire a host of hardware and software technologies needed for what the Navy calls C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaisance. Naturally, the Navy keeps most of this technology under wraps—literally. When maintenance crews work on U.S. warships at the Navy base here, they often wrap up parts of the superstructure before servicing the radar and other electronics.

So a presentation yesterday by Frank Gordon, who heads SPAWAR’s navigation and applied sciences department, represented an unusual opportunity to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds the Navy labs on Point Loma. SPAWAR is an enormous organization, with more than 6,300 civilian, military, and contract workers just at its San Diego headquarters, and local spending of almost $991 million on procurement contracts and R&D programs, according to the latest data available at SPAWAR’s web site. Gordon says that at any given time, SPAWAR is overseeing more than 800 technology development programs in San Diego.

About 100 people attended the session, which was sponsored by Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group that promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. Connect was founded at UC San Diego in 1985 as a resource for academic researchers who wanted to start technology-based companies based on their laboratory breakthroughs. At SPAWAR’s government lab in San Diego, scientists also spin out new companies and technologies, said Jim Fallin, a spokesman for SPAWAR Systems Center.

Gordon, who is nicknamed “Dr. Chaos” because of his love of nonlinear dynamics, highlighted some of the advanced technologies that SPAWAR is developing for … Next Page »

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In the 11 years since Andrew Hibbs started QUASAR, the privately held company has flourished by developing a smorgasbord of sophisticated sensing technologies under various government research and development contracts.

I met Hibbs more than a decade ago, during the formative years of San Diego’s Quantum Magnetics, where he led development of advanced electromagnetic sensors so sensitive they could detect the unique molecular resonance of explosives. His work resulted in the first commercially available explosives detector using Nuclear Quadrapole Resonance, a technology akin to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that are commonly used in medical diagnostics.

Hibbs founded QUASAR in 1998, after InVision Technologies acquired Quantum Magnetics (and General Electric acquired InVision in 2004). Hibbs acquired a penchant for studying the quantum phenomena at the core of such technologies while earning his PhD in physics at England’s Cambridge University. In fact, he named the company for Quantum Applied Science & Research.

Since QUASAR was founded, Hibbs has formed a group of several related companies focused on biomedical, geophysical, and various military applications of electromagnetic sensing. The company bills itself as a world leader in low-frequency electromagnetic sensing systems that operate at room temperatures (at frequencies from 0.01 Hz to 5 MHz).

When I dropped in for a briefing earlier this week, Hibbs was out of town, so I met with Lowell Burnett, chief technology officer for QUASAR Federal Systems and at least four other PhDs who oversee different development efforts within the group. Burnett told me the QUASAR group has grown to about 70 employees (at least a third are former Quantum Magnetics employees), funded solely by revenues from government contracts.

Burnett says QUASAR’s scientists have made steady advances in electromagnetic sensors, particularly in electric field sensors, with each group applying … Next Page »

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In 1994, the Pentagon awarded a contract to develop a new type of unmanned aircraft to a three-year-old company in San Diego. The idea behind the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration was to build a more robust version of a drone that a former Israeli aircraft designer had developed in the 1980s. The result was the Predator, an unmanned surveillance aircraft that has become a mainstay of U.S. military forces, and which is renowned for its role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

San Diego’s General Atomics Aeronautical Systems has been steadily expanding the aircraft’s capabilities ever since, and the Predator’s role has grown from the CIA and U.S. Air Force, to include the Navy and Army. The private company embarked on a new course, though, on Sept. 1, 2005, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security selected the Predator for a new role—as a robot on air patrol above the borders of the United States itself.

Until now, the CBP mission has focused on the U.S. border with Mexico and in the Caribbean. The agency flies Predators from a base in Sierra Vista, AZ, where it maintains four of the unmanned aircraft. But the mission entered a new phase in recent weeks, as CBP gears up to begin Predator air patrols along the North Dakota border with Canada.

A border patrol Predator

“This is a first deployment to get the lay of the land and see how well it operates,” said CBP Air and Marine Assistant Commissioner Michael Kostelnik, a retired Air Force major general. He says pilots who fly the aircraft remotely from a new CBP unmanned aircraft operations center in Grand Forks, ND, will have to gain experience, for example, landing a Predator on icy, windswept runways in winter.

Kostelnik told me it’s also trickier for a Predator pilot to detect ice building up on the aircraft’s wings, because they’re not in the cockpit. He says one of the pilots in Arizona who flew a Predator into Hurricane Gustav in September realized ice was building up … Next Page »

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It has taken roughly 10 years, but a robotic helicopter created in San Diego by Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) is finally nearing a critical test phase for the U.S. Navy.

The unmanned aircraft, known as the Fire Scout, looks unremarkable, except for the fact that it has no windows. It is based on a small civilian helicopter, the Schweizer Model 333, and New York-based Schweizer Aircraft supplies the basic airframe.

But the electronics inside the gray helicopter are another story. Known in the military bureaucracy as a VUAS, or Vertical Unmanned Aircraft System, the Fire Scout is intended primarily for maritime reconnaissance and for “situational awareness” just beyond the edges of a Naval battle group. It also has a laser to pinpoint targets for the Navy’s laser-guided missiles and bombs. The robotic helicopter is designed to take off and land autonomously, fly as far as 110 nautical miles (about 126.6 statute miles), and operate continuously for 8 hours.

The Fire Scout and USS McInerney

When I noticed the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, MD, recently awarded a $40 million follow-on order to make three more Fire Scouts, I decided to ask Northrop for an update on the aircraft’s progress.

After completing a crucial series of tests in 2006, the Fire Scout is scheduled to undergo a technical evaluation aboard the guided missile frigate U.S.S. McInerney in the next few months. “The Navy wants to see how wind affects the aircraft and how it performs with the ship at sea,” says John VanBrabant, who heads business development for the V-UAS (Vertical Unmanned Aircraft System) group at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in San Diego.

To appreciate what this means, VanBrabant says the tests conducted in January, 2006, showed the helicopter’s electronics can land the Fire Scout autonomously on a moving Navy warship that was operating off the coast of Maryland. The robotic … Next Page »

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With only two eyes apiece, spanning a mere 180-degree field of view, humans have an innately limited understanding of what it means to see. Some insects have compound eyes with hundreds or thousands of facets that can form a nearly 360-degree picture of the world around them. The shells of many scallop species are rimmed by 100 or more brilliant blue eyes; a scallop can’t actually see much (since it doesn’t even have a brain), but its eyes can detect motion from any direction, warning it when to clam up.

Inspired in part by the scallop, engineers at Tenebraex—a small Boston company that makes optical equipment for the military—are unveiling a new type of surveillance camera today that combines images from five separate image sensors, each equivalent to the camera in a typical cell phone. Each camera has a roughly 40-degree field of view, and when stitched together, the five video feeds span a full 180 degrees, giving security personnel a comprehensive real-time view of a scene without the distortion created by traditional fisheye lenses, and without the delays created by remote-control pan-and-tilt cameras. Tenebraex’s engineers call the device the Digital Window, and it’s the debut product for Scallop Imaging, a new Tenebraex subsidiary that hopes to sell its technology to camera makers and system integrators in the security industry.

“Using multiple, lost-cost imaging sensors allows you to do things you couldn’t do otherwise,” says Peter Jones, president of Tenebraex. “They’re small enough and cheap enough that you can put them anyplace where you want situational awareness, without having to install a big eyeball with a motor turning it back and forth.” That could be a big advantage in locations where purse-snatchers and other wrongdoers have learned to look for remote-controlled cameras and strike when they’re pointed away. “There’s no motion to catch your eye, because the sensors are looking everywhere at once,” says Jones.

The Digital Window device is so small it will fit into a hole in the wall the same size as a light switch or power socket. It’s powered by the same Ethernet cable that connects it to a building’s surveillance system.

The Digital Window is only the latest in a eclectic series of vision-related technologies from Tenebraex. The company’s first product was a honeycomb-like screen that fits over the lenses of military-grade binoculars and rifle sights to keep out glare and prevent reflections that might give away a user’s position. (Reflections off optical devices are a more serious problem in wartime than you might think: a glint from Moshe Dayan’s binoculars during the 1941 Allied invasion of Syria showed a Vichy French soldier where to shoot, costing the future Israeli general and politician his left eye.) Using a similar type of screen, Tenebraex licenses filters to Philips Lighting that make vehicle headlights look black, red, or blue when they’re turned off. The company also makes a full-color night vision system, as well as a system called EyePilot that helps color-blind people distinguish different colors on a computer display.

Jones says the impetus for Digital Window originally sprang from a request from the Department of Defense, which wanted to add a large bulletproof window to the door of the M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The window would give soldiers about to exit the vehicle a better look at what awaited them. But it would also create a huge reflection, so some kind of camouflaging system was needed.

In the end, the project was dropped. “But what they really wanted to do in the Bradley was to make that door, in effect, transparent,” says Jones. “It doesn’t really matter how you get there—you just want an undistorted view. That was the genesis of the idea; it got us thinking about using multiple, low-cost sensors on the outside of the vehicle and having a display inside.”

Digital Window is the first instantiation of that idea—it’s just built for stationary installation as part of a security system, rather than the outside of a moving vehicle. (Not coincidentally, however, Scallop is investigating automotive applications of the technology, including distortion-free backup cameras for the rear ends of trucks, vans, and SUVs.)

In a way, Digital Window is the video equivalent of the low-budget panoramic and gigapixel imaging techniques that are becoming popular among amateur digital photographers (a subject I covered in a column last summer). The key to making a decent panorama or gigapixel image is to … Next Page »

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If you thought the notorious Total Information Awareness program went away when Congress eliminated funding for the Pentagon’s mass-surveillance experiment in 2003, you were misled. The program itself may have been dismantled, but as an investigation by the Wall Street Journal detailed in March, many pieces of it were simply transferred to other federal agencies, where they’re now part of a massive effort to mine U.S. residents’ e-mail messages, bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel records, Web searches, and telephone records for signs of terrorist conspiracy. Suspects identified by this mining can be targeted by the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program for wiretapping and other searches without a warrant—a practice authorized by President Bush in 2002, first publicly exposed by the New York Times in 2005, and legalized by Congress in 2007.

Exactly what kind of a world are we building with these domestic spying programs—and could we unbuild it now, even if we wanted to? Those are the questions posed by a fictional-but-realistic BBC miniseries, “The Last Enemy,” that concluded this week on PBS. I highly recommend it—and if you rush, you can still watch the whole five-hour series at the PBS website (it’s available online until November 9). You can also pre-order a DVD of the series for delivery in January.

In an interesting bit of timing on PBS’s part, the series closer aired on November 2, just two days before Americans decisively turned away from the Bush-Cheney legacy and its shocking assault on civil liberties in favor of a President-elect, Barack Obama, who has worked in the Senate to rein in the Patriot Act and who promised during the campaign that he would end warrantless wiretaps. We may not know until after January 20 where an overhaul of the nation’s intelligence-gathering apparatus will rank on Obama’s priority list. But the moment is clearly ripe for a rollback of many of the abuses perpetrated by the Bush administration in the name of national security.

What could happen if democratic societies continue to sacrifice liberty for the appearance of security is the subject of “The Last Enemy,” a depressing tale set in London in the year 2011. Closed-circuit surveillance is ubiquitous (not much of a stretch, given that Britain already has 5 million closed-circuit cameras) and every citizen must carry an ID card linked to their thumbprint and iris scan (also not much of a stretch—the British parliament passed a national identity card act in 2006, and starting in 2010 everyone who applies for a passport will be issued a card and placed in a national identity register). In this near-future world, the government is in the final testing phases of an all-encompassing national intelligence database called (you guessed it) Total Information Awareness.

As the story begins, a brilliant, antisocial mathematician, Stephen Ezard, is returning from self-imposed exile in China to attend the funeral of his brother, an international aid worker supposedly killed in a roadside bombing in Afghanistan. Stephen gradually learns that refugees treated in his brother’s camp have been dying from a tainted hepatitis vaccine, and that his brother was working to expose the government’s cover-up. Stephen promptly falls in love with his brother’s widow, and is asked by the British government to evaluate—and then assist with public relations for—TIA. We soon begin to suspect that the government has invited Stephen into the program simply to keep a closer eye on him. He gets a couple of steps ahead of his minders, and figures out how to exploit the database to track down vaccine researchers who might help to untangle the conspiracy. But that leads to some nasty surprises—and I won’t give away any more of the story.

The writing and acting in “The Last Enemy” are a bit duller than what I usually expect from the BBC, but the story is well-researched and chillingly plausible. If it were shorter, I’d say that it should be mandatory viewing for high school and college civics classes. What’s most disturbing about the show’s plot is the way that Stephen’s attempts to evade TIA’s web (once he begins to learn how deep the conspiracy goes) are taken as de facto evidence that he’s a danger to national security. How often has it been said that surveillance programs are harmless, since innocent, law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide? The problem with this logic, of course, is its dark corollary—that anyone who seems to be hiding something must be guilty.

I’ve always been amazed by the British flair for technological dystopianism—just think of Orwell’s 1984, Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and the utterly devastating “28 Days Later.” If I had to guess at an explanation for this phenomenon, I’d say that England had a front-row view as her sister industrial democracy, Germany, descended into Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. In the aftermath, a few British authors and filmmakers have been sufficiently honest and courageous to point out related tendencies in their own society, like xenophobia, grandiosity, technological triumphalism, and a fetish for bureaucracy and authority figures.

As the Bush-Cheney era finally lifts, will Americans take an equally honest look at how 9/11 exacerbated our own none-too-latent xenophobia? Will our government come to understand that constant electronic scrutiny is itself a violation of our privacy? Not without some pushing. Yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union published a transition plan calling on Obama to “begin repairing the damage to freedom” on day one of his presidency by, among many other things, prohibiting the National Security Agency from monitoring the communications of U.S. citizens and residents without a warrant. He will doubtless have bigger things on his mind, like preventing a depression, exiting Iraq, and stabilizing Afghanistan. But through his choice of an attorney general and his early policies on issues such as implementing a civil-liberties board to oversee the Patriot Act, Obama has the opportunity to reverse eight years of progress toward a total-surveillance state. To push through legislation that heads off new abuses in the future, he’ll need the voices of concerned citizens behind him. And if, in the end, we can’t elect leaders who will restore and respect our liberties, then perhaps we deserve to be treated like the enemy.

For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail.

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The way Alfredo Ramirez talks, the Global Hawk does not epitomize an avant-garde aerospace design—even though the robotic spy plane operates at the uppermost boundaries of advanced military aircraft.

The 46-year-old Ramirez is the lead designer for the Global Hawk, a high-altitude UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle. I recently sat down with him to discuss his work on the Global Hawk, a conversation that amounted to his first public conversation about aerospace innovation.

With a bulbous nose and a ‘V’ shaped tail, the Global Hawk looks vaguely like a flying beluga whale. The fuselage is 47.6 feet long—–half the length of a Boeing 737 jetliner—but its wings are thin and unusually long, giving the craft a total wingspan of 130.9 feet.

The Global Hawk is capable of flying 35 hours and operating at 65,000 feet—or approximately 12 to 13 miles above the Earth’s surface. It carries no weapons, but the latest model holds 3,000 pounds of surveillance equipment, including advanced “synthetic aperture” radar, as well as electro-optical and infrared sensors that can provide high-resolution images of an area as big as Alabama.

A typical mission these days calls for the Global Hawk to take off from California’s Beale Air Force Base and fly autonomously to the Mideast. There it can patrol high above the Syrian and Iranian borders with Iraq for nearly 24 hours. Radar and sensor data is transmitted directly from the spy plane via satellite to mission control in California for dissemination to U.S. military commanders in Iraq.

Ramirez says the Global Hawk reflects an incremental progression from previous designs, as well as the need to constantly balance the demands of cost, performance, and risk.

Still, the craft was sexy enough to serve as a background prop in this year’s superhero movie, Iron Man, a cinematic homage to advanced technology and robotics-laden special effects. The design also won the 2000 Collier Trophy, the industry’s top aeronautical achievement, awarded annually by the National Aeronautic Association.

To Ramirez, however, the spy plane with no cockpit and a single jet engine mounted atop its fuselage represents a fairly conventional aircraft design.

“Aircraft design is usually evolutionary, rarely is it revolutionary,” he says. Wing design is a perfect example, he says. “You do iterations. You make them longer, wider, thinner, shorter—and then you run calculations to analyze each design.”

The Global Hawk was developed in the mid-1990s at Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical, a San Diego aerospace company that was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 1999. When Ramirez joined Teledyne Ryan’s advanced development group in 1985 as a freshly graduated aerospace engineer from San Diego State University, the company already had extensive experience developing jet-powered drones that had flown reconnaissance missions over Vietnam.

Ramirez says he gained experience working on several … Next Page »

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Even before events like 9/11, the Madrid train bombings, and the London Underground bombings, governments and corporations were busy blanketing outdoor and indoor spaces with networked cameras, reasoning that video surveillance can help security professionals spot criminal activity in progress, or at least get it on tape. But there’s one big problem with the blanket approach: the more cameras an organization installs, the more people it takes to watch them, and the more recorded video there is to review if an incident occurs. It’s a classic case of information overload.

Many analysts have predicted that this problem will eventually be solved by moving some of the intelligence in a video surveillance network to its edges: that is, by building “smart” cameras that can determine on their own whether the events they’re observing are suspicious, then alert human operators in real time, or store the video stream differently, so that there’s more information to help investigators later.

And now a Bedford, MA, company called VideoIQ—a 2007 spinout of General Electric’s security division—is taking the first steps in that direction. The company is set to release its first smart digital surveillance cameras in August, and it announced today that it has more than doubled its venture financing pot, raising $10 million in a Series B round led by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. (Existing investors Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture, both headquartered in Waltham, MA, were also in on the round.)

VideoIQ’s new camera, the Intelligent IP Surveillance Camera with Video Recording, or iCVR, has a built-in Linux computer with video analytics software that can identify events of interest—for example, a person approaching the perimeter of a power plant—and notify a security guard. It also has a hard drive that’s smart enough to save digital video data at full resolution when there’s something interesting going on within the camera’s field of view, but compress it when there’s nothing happening, meaning that it can store up to two months’ worth of data, compared to the week or two stored by many older systems.

“This is the first generation of a very powerful technology that we believe will revolutionize surveillance, because the vast majority of all video systems are not monitored at all,” says VideoIQ president and CEO Scott Schnell, a former Atlas entrepreneur-in-residence who is a veteran of RSA Security, Photonics, Apple, McKinsey, and Chevron. “The primary purpose is to enable the delivery of forensic information quickly and efficiently, if something does happen.”

The iCVR isn’t the first surveillance camera with built-in hard drive and video compression software, but it’s one of the first to add video analytics software to the mix. Currently, adding motion-detection or object-tracking capability to an existing surveillance network can cost $1,000 to $2,000 per camera, according to Schnell. But because VideoIQ’s analytics software runs on the same built-in processor used for compression and storage management, customers essentially get it for free.

And if an organization replaces or upgrades its existing surveillance systems with VideoIQ cameras—a project that will cost about $1,800 per camera, Schnell says—it also gets a distributed storage system that doesn’t rely on a central recording device (a collection of VideoIQ cameras functions, in essence, as one big networked DVR), as well as cameras with state-of-the-art sensors from Mountain View, CA-based Pixim that are capable of seeing in both bright sunlight and low-light, nighttime conditions.

The biggest initial customers for the system, Schnell believes, will be large facilities with extensive outdoor perimeters that need protecting. “The larger the perimeter, the more costly it is to have manned patrols, and the more monotonous it is” to monitor video cameras visually, Schnell points out. But if the cameras themselves are tuned to … Next Page »

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This week, iRobot made a splash with the news that it has signed a sole licensing agreement with the University of Washington in Seattle to commercialize UW’s “Seaglider” underwater robot. The specific terms of the deal with UW TechTransfer were not disclosed, but the announcement marks the Bedford, MA-based robotics company’s first foray into the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) market.

Best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaners and military PackBots, iRobot is diving into a field that includes local competitors like Cambridge, MA-based Bluefin Robotics and Hydroid in Pocasset, MA. The company sees oceanographers and military planners as the main potential buyers of the technology—anyone who wants to monitor the properties of the ocean environment accurately and over long periods of time.

“We’ve been looking at entering the underwater space for a while,” says Helen Greiner, cofounder and chairman of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT). She says her team was impressed by the Seaglider technology, and earlier this spring, after talking with UW, she sent MIT roboticist and iRobot CTO Rodney Brooks (an Xconomist) out to Seattle. “He bridged the gap between the academic community and the company, and was a really good ambassador,” Greiner says. “Universities exist for scientific reasons, for doing research, while at the same time they want to get their baby out into the world.”

What impressed Greiner most about the Seaglider was its efficiency and durability. Developed by researchers at the UW Applied Physics Lab and School of Oceanography, each Seaglider is about the size of a person (1.8 meters long, 52 kilograms) and is shaped like a torpedo with wings that allow it to “glide” through the water. It can travel distances of several thousand kilometers—going out to sea for six or seven months at a time—diving to depths of up to 1 kilometer and surfacing periodically to get a GPS fix or transmit data. (You can even track in real-time where the 70-odd Seagliders are deployed in the field, including one off the coast of Washington, here.)

It does all this with no moving external parts, which is key—most AUVs out there use propellers, which allow them to move much faster than the Seaglider’s 25 centimeters per second, but they don’t last very long in the field (just a few days, for instance). With Seaglider, “you don’t need a ship in the area to pick them up and drop them off,” says Fritz Stahr, head of the Seaglider Fabrication Center at UW, which builds the vehicles for research groups. “You deploy them and go away.”

The iRobot deal should benefit the University of Washington’s development teams in terms of reach and exposure. “We can’t build very many at the same time, so we’ve usually had a year-long backlog,” says Stahr. “So it’s always been in the university’s plan to do a license. This will allow the vehicle to see uses far beyond academia, to make it to markets heretofore unseen.”

Seagliders can be equipped … Next Page »

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OK, we’re big on robots around here. From iRobot’s landmark court case to Kiva’s shuffling warehouse bots, from the FIRST (For Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology) high-school robot competition to Hydroid’s Navy contract for robot submarines, we’ve been covering the business of bots in depth and on the ground since our inception. And why’s that?

Well, for one thing, robots are just cool. They capture our imagination like few other technologies do. Robots are R2-D2 saving the day, the Terminator delivering one-liners in an Austrian accent, and Iron Man flying through the air, guns ablaze. It’s why anyone ever got into the business in the first place.

What’s more, the greater Boston area has clearly established itself as one of the world’s leading centers for robotics. There are more than 150 companies, institutions, and research labs that deal in robots or robot components here. That adds up to more than 1,500 workers, $150 million in government contracts, and $250 million in annual sales, according to the official state organization presiding over it all—the Massachusetts Robotics Cluster, which is a subgroup of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, a non-profit that fosters entrepreneurship and promotes tech companies.

Not that it’s necessarily a boom time for robotics firms. Everywhere you look, budgets are tight. “It’s a bit tough for early stage companies,” says Paul Coster, an analyst at JPMorgan who watches iRobot. “Very few have viable business models.” To be successful in today’s climate, he adds, it’s becoming more important “to roll up and come to market with a proven model.”

With this state of the robotics union firmly in mind, we wanted to provide the definitive local guide. Following our stories on the greater Boston Internet video cluster and the hidden hub of music and technology, we wanted to track down every commercial outfit doing significant work in robotics—everything from mobile to medical robots, software to hardware, electromechanics to exoskeletons. We drew the line if the company made sensors, electronics, or energy sources that could be used by robots, but did not focus primarily on robot products.

Looking at the list, a few things leapt out at us. The majority of firms (at least 13 out of 24) get substantial support from defense contracts, while most others serve niche markets. Local companies are strong in mobile robots and vehicles, growing in medical robots, and not as strong in industrial applications. We’ve also included a couple of non-companies—organizations that we feel are making a direct impact on the industry. But this is by no means a comprehensive list. If we’ve missed something, please leave us a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

We’re also working on putting together a networking event to bring the local robotics community together to talk about the pressing issues, and maybe raise a few of our own—like what are the potentially transformative applications for robots in society that nobody is thinking of? In the meantime, enjoy our guide…

Aurora Flight Sciences
Cambridge, MA
Vertical take-off unmanned aerial vehicles for defense and aerospace applications. The company is headquartered in Manassas, VA, but established an R&D center in Kendall Square in 2005.

Barrett Technology
Cambridge, MA
Best known for its WAM (Whole-Arm Manipulation), a state-of-the-art robotic arm, used for rehabilitation and manufacturing applications such as spray-painting. It might even be used to help repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Barrett began in 1990 as a spinoff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Black-I Robotics
Tyngsborough, MA
Incorporated in 2006, Black-I develops unmanned ground vehicles for security and defense. Its robots have been tested by the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad at Logan Airport for detecting and disrupting car bombs.

Bluefin
Cambridge, MA
Autonomous underwater vehicles for detecting surface mines, and other defense applications using sonar and hydrophones. The company was spun out of MIT in 1997, and became a subsidiary of Battelle Memorial Institute in 2005.

Boston Dynamics
Cambridge, MA
Founded in 1992 out of MIT, Boston Dynamics focuses on human movement simulations and legged robots that can walk and run over rough terrain. A recent YouTube video of the company’s remarkable Big Dog quadruped robot has attracted millions of viewers—and generated a hilarious parody. … Next Page »

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