Having grown out of a research grant from a major defense contractor, Agile Sensor Technologies Inc. is now marketing products that improve the operation of unmanned vehicles that travel in the sky, the sea and on land.

Founded on intellectual property developed at Memorial University, the St. John’s company is now selling its own proprietary quadcopter  (a little unmanned helicopter with four rotors) that is stable even in high winds. It is also selling a novel mechanism that grants more movement to cameras mounted on drones and submersible vehicles.

Headed by President and CEO Brian Terry, Agile has found solutions to some of the major problems associated with the growing industry surrounding unmanned aircraft. Though they have thousands of industrial, safety and military applications, the use of drones is limited because they generally can only fly in good weather. And there are restrictions on where they can fly because of difficulties sensing and avoiding oncoming aircraft.

“Sense-and-avoid is difficult, so we’ve moved beyond that,” said Terry in an interview. He explained that Agile’s device – the Parallel Kinematic Mechanism -- allows a new way to move cameras on drones with greater freedom than now exists. 

The story of Agile Sensor Technologies began in 2007 when Memorial received a grant from a major defense contractor to study and find solutions to the sense-and-avoid problem. The funding increased to about $3.6 million when the university received Atlantic Innovation Fund money from of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and a grant from the Research and Development Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Researcher Nick Krouglicof, who is now Agile’s CTO and Vice-President of Research and Development, led the research. He began to focus on intelligent cameras, or those in which the image processing is done in the camera, not in base stations on the ground.

What they noticed was problems in the aiming system for these cameras, which relied on gimbal systems, or systems that relied on the camera pivoting on two axes.  Krouglicof realized that these systems weren’t fast or accurate enough and consumed too much power. He set out to cure these faults, and to minimize the weight and dimensions of the pointing device.

“So they invented a new type of pointing system to replace the gimbal – including a new type of ball joint and a new type of linear motor,” said Terry. The team is now in the process of patenting the new type of pointing device and the motor, which allows more speed, power and flexibility than the gimbal system. As well as being used in drones, it also has applications in unmanned underwater and surface craft.

The work with the new camera system led the team to experiment further in a novel quadcopter to test the intelligent camera. “It has taken on a life of its own,” said Terry. “It uses a technology that may not be used by any other quadcopter in the market, and there are a lot of them.”

This technology allows the unit to withstand wind gusts of as much as 50 kilometers an hour, said Terry.

In August, Terry, Krouglicof and sales and marketing specialist Michael Harvey teamed up to launch a company to sell these products. They are licensing the intellectual property from Memorial and are in contact with large multinationals that could prove to be customers.  It hopes to develop a manufacturing facility for the devices in St. John’s in the autumn of 2015.

Agile is now working on raising capital with a target of $1.5 million.

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