The Waivtec story begins more than 25 years ago with a dedicated team developing advanced real-time hyperspectral imaging systems for the US Defenses Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US military. The expertise developed on these projects gave us great insight into how to design and deploy sensing systems that create and process massive amounts of data. This effort culminated in nine years focused on wide-area imagery and video through various generations and variants of gigapixel class imaging systems. The most well-known endeavor was the Autonomous Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance (ARGUS) family of systems developed for DARPA and ultimately deployed by the US Air Force. Our focus on DARPA programs resulted in a team that is used to thinking ten or twenty years into the future to create revolutionary advances to seemingly impossible technical challenges.

That mindset and systems expertise was then brought to bear on other technologies, foremost of which is the low-cost munition seeker for DARPA’s Seeker Cost Transformation (SECTR) program. This low-cost, coffee cup-sized, device was self-navigating (i.e., GPS-denied) and incorporated embedded AI for object detection, recognition, and identification. This effort gave our team great insight into how to miniaturize high-throughput AI-based systems. Combining this expertise is how Waivtec is able to develop small, low-cost, wide-area imaging systems that outperform competitors by an order of magnitude. The team also undertook many adjacent DARPA programs that informed our understanding of processing and sensing technology – these included mixed-signal and photonic AI processing chip designs, multi-user RF and multi-modal systems, and space-based autonomy modules. The culmination of this knowledge results in Waivtec’s deep understanding of wide-area systems and a cutting edge WAIV platform.