Tucson Embedded Systems (TES) is very active in long-term research and development to create the systems needed by all industries we service.

We recently completed a two-year support contract for PEO Aviation which involved researching and solving integration issues for integrating radios onto various aircraft platforms. We also stay current on the future force activities as is demonstrated by our contract with the Doctrine and Training Directorate at Fort Huachuca in the development of ARTEP manuals for the United States Army Military Intelligence Brigade.

Previous TES R&D Projects

The brief descriptions below are a sample of some of the projects that TES has successfully accomplished.

University of Arizona - Industrial Advisory Council

Small Business Innovation Research Grants

One tool TES uses for direction is the Small Business Innovation Research grants (SBIRs) whereby four times per year each DoD branch describes numerous issues they would like solved and provide funding to accomplish the objective. TES was awarded and successfully completed two Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) projects (Navy and SOCOM) and is waiting on a Phase II award with the Navy.

DARPA Urban Challenge

One of the primary projects TES worked, with many of the required technologies, was the DARPA Urban Challenge. This project involved the development of a fully autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). TES performed the role of systems integrator for the UGV by providing the primary embedded processing system, sensors, sensor integration, Capability Driven Architecture (CDA, patent pending) as the underlying architecture and sensor integrator toolkit, and a ground station for logging and visualizing the raw and processed data streams. The UGV utilized sensors of all types to give a better picture of the physical environment which was utilized by the cognitive process for controlling the vehicle. Sensors integrated by the team included Lidar, Radar, a Gimbaled Lidar and Radar unified sensor including basic target tracking, a GPS, an IMU/INU, and a video-based lane sensor. The video system, which TES supported development, provided motion compensation as well as various filtering techniques for culling unwanted noise. The video was also archived in a time-based database for future reference.

Capability Driven Architecture (CDA, patent pending) was utilized for integrating these sensors and providing a unified vision for the vehicle within the cognitive module. CDA, patent pending, was developed by TES as a software architecture that borrows from the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). CDA focuses on creating a platform-independent model of the software system and heavily relies on automated tools to translate that model to software. It is these tools, along with the CDA library toolkit, which provide a very high level support for low-level devices such as sensors, radios, UAVs and missiles.