Neya Systems has been awarded a Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Phase II SBIR (Topic OSD13-HS4) to develop a software tool to rapidly and rigorously evaluate the performance of perception and autonomy algorithms for unmanned systems.
Under this Phase II SBIR, Neya will be extending Phase I work, along with technology developed under prior Army and DHS SBIR efforts to combine our mission planning toolkits with our perception development suite. UxPress (Unmanned Systems Perception Evaluation and Simulation System) will, when completed, include the ability to develop single and multi-vehicle unmanned systems missions that rely on on-board or payload-based perception, simulate those missions, and collect metrics on mission performance centered around the robustness of integrated perception capabilities.
“TEV&V is a growing challenge within DoD, as autonomy capabilities continue to mature and move towards deployment. UxPress provides a modular, mission-centric test and evaluation framework to address one of the hardest problems in autonomy, that of robust and reliable outdoor perception”, said Dr. Parag Batavia, president of Neya Systems.
UxPRESS is designed to allow existing and new perception algorithms to be evaluated and rapidly tuned for a variety of heterogeneous unmanned platforms (ground and air), resulting in greater re-use of contractor-developed innovation, the reduction of integration time with new capabilities, and simplified formal analysis of expected and real-world performance to quantify systems design decisions. The goal of UxPRESS is to move away from relying on rules of thumb and evaluator bias, towards a formal systems integration approach for perception capability test and evaluation.
UxPress will be compliant with the RS-JPO Interoperability Profile (IOP).