For immediate release:
Autonomous Systems Cooperative ( ASC ) is pleased to announce the formation of a new consulting organization dedicated to serving the commercial UAS industry. This new company brings together a rich assembly of skills to assist businesses and research groups take advantage of the growing drone revolution. ASC is capable of offering a full range of services from rapid assistance with simple problems, all the way to turn-key solutions. This includes vehicle design, payload integration, high performance tuning, custom user interfaces, and data analysis integration.
ASC aims to assist customers in rapidly prototyping and developing new systems by combining the skills and talents of a team of developers, engineers and technologists experienced in all things autonomous. The result is customers achieving their goals faster than if they had approached the problem inhouse alone. ASC can offer a complete end-to-end system solution: From vehicle to autopilot to sensors to communication to mobile and desktop user control.
ASC was founded by 3 partners with decades of combined experience with autonomous vehicle systems and related technologies. Furthermore, ASC is able to draw on the resources of a diverse worldwide network of specialized experts to cover the gamut of unique scenarios. Clients benefit from dealing with one professional organization, without having to find, retain, and manage several disparate contractors. Needs for engineering, program management, operations, and education can all be satisfied by a single entity.
ASC has advanced experience working with and contributing to the ArduPilot ecosystem, which is the leading opensource autonomous vehicle control platform. ArduPilot has evolved over 10 years to be the most flexible, powerful, reliable, and full featured codebase, capable of running on small and affordable 8bit microcontrollers, all the way up to powerful multicore processors. This allows it to control anything from micro air vehicles to large and powerful mobile robotics systems complete with LIDAR scanners, machine vision, image processing and other advanced sensor packages.
The founders also have extensively leveraged other commercial grade platforms and are thus well positioned to advise customers on the best technology suite for their application. ASC is here to deliver unified, end to end solutions to save customers time and money sourcing talent, components, and approaches for complicated projects requiring autonomous vehicle systems beyond what is offered off the shelf.
Founder Bios:
Robert Lefebvre: A mechanical engineer with diverse skills derived from experience in automotive engineering and industrial controls. Old fashioned and new age at the same time, he is capable of operating machine tools and GTAW welding, to electronics assembly, and even 3D Printing and C++ programming. He is a recognized expert in rotary aerodynamics, including not just multirotor drones, but conventional helicopter designs which he is keen to promote for their numerous performance advantages over other systems.
Robert has been flying radio control airplanes and racing RC cars for 20 years. He got involved in the Ardupilot project out of an interest in mounting a camera onto an RC Helicopter for aerial photography, long before this concept was mainstream in the drone world. Not having any previous experience with RC helis, he was interested in an autopilot to make the task easier. He bought his first Ardupilot system in 2011, and since then has become a major contributor to the Arducopter codebase, and lead developer of the Traditional Helicopter branch. His knowledge of physics, vehicle dynamics, control systems and human factors engineering have helped Ardupilot evolve into the high performance flight control system it is today.
Rob lives with his wife and 2 kids in a small town in rural Ontario where they enjoy easy access to fresh air and open spaces. Rob’s interest in extreme sports has tempered somewhat since becoming a family man, but together they enjoy canoeing, remote camping, and offroad motorcycles.
Bill Bonney: A microelectronics and software engineer who has spent 15 years in the trenches of the mobile software revolution. Previous work has included early Bluetooth solutions, picture messaging, mobile gaming SDKs, and Nokia App Store mobile clients. In last few years Bill has been deeply involved in sUAS and developed the first commercially available iOS GCS for ArduPilot, MAVPilot. He was contracted to work on the open source APM Planner 2.0 project for 3DRs Iris and the Pixhawk flight controller.
Key Skills are mobile software development in iOS (ObjC/Swift) and Android(Java). Desktop development using Qt technologies for cross platform support. C/C++/ObjC, Java, HTML/CSS/JavaScript. And embedded systems in C/C++.
Bill is a keen Amateur Radio enthusiast interested in exploring long range radio communications. The wife looks on despairingly, but the kids think an antenna tower would be cool.
Patrick Krekelberg: As founder of an R&D collaborative focused on sustainable technologies, Patrick has had the opportunity to participate in numerous unique product design efforts. This has involved contribution to a number of patented or patent pending systems including navigation, creation and display of interactive media, and novel approaches to modeling reallife scenarios.
Patrick began operating RC machines during a childhood fascination with homemade robots starting more than 30 years ago. This led to an early career emphasis on complex science oriented software, embedded hardware systems, and integration of the two. This began at Honeywell Aerospace in the Commercial Avionics division which develops inertial navigation systems. Next, he joined the Modeling and Simulation group at United Defense (now BAE Systems) when an autonomous ground artillery vehicle and resupply system was being developed.
The 14 years since have been occupied by cooperative invention and custom engineering intermingled with self studies in photography, traditional music, horticulture, and various other creative endeavors. In recent years, commercial and research applications for UAS have been a primary area of focus. He and his family operate an experimental off-grid homestead in the forested highlands near the North Shore of Lake Superior.
For more information please contact us; we look forward to all enquires.
-Rob, Bill & Patrick
info@autosystems.io
http://autosystems.io
