You provide the aircraft. KEF provides the autonomy.
Since our founding we’ve focused on how to provide flexible autonomy solutions that work on a wide range of aircraft. Our goal is “any computer, any camera, any aircraft”. Striving for seamless integration drives our approach.
KEF’s mission is to leverage the visual spectrum to provide onboard safety and autonomy systems for new and existing aircraft. These systems will allow our customers to solve existing problems and tackle new challenges. While we are focusing on deployed autonomy and fly our systems constantly, we’re also tackling fundamental challenges in software and simulation to allow any aircraft to leverage cameras more effectively.
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TECHNOlogy
Vision-based navigation
Hazard detection and avoidance
Stereo vision allows cameras to extract depth, allowing our software to detect hazards and enable safe trajectory planning.
Leveraging Machine Learning on Aircraft
We can take the same data we're using to navigate and leverage Machine Learning to understand mission-relevant context. KEF’s first use of machine learning was to recognize ‘racing gates’ during AlphaPilot. Today we’re training our lightweight networks to classify, recognize, and localize objects of interest to customers and pilots.
HArdware agnosticism
Since we don't build aircraft, we need to make our capabilities as easy as possible to deploy. In the video below, we're running our visual navigation on a gimbal with rolling shutter cameras. We achieved drift rates under 2% at elevations up to 400'.
Terrain Relative Navigation for GPS-denied Environments
KEF is working to allow aircraft to use visual landmarks to determine their position as they would with GPS. We’re building new tools to provide a solution regardless of the season or time of day, and robust to weather and reduced visibility.
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