Emerging Technology Ventures (ETV) develops autonomous air and ground systems with integrated sensing/inspection and artificial intelligence driven predictive analytics for complex environments. The company, based in Alamogordo, New Mexico, provides systems, solutions, and services to government and commercial customers.
Cliff Hudson and his team had an idea to use drones equipped with artificial intelligence to remotely analyze possible damage on wind turbines. However, their limited resources meant that they needed help developing machine learning-based damage detection and assessment engines. Hudson approached the New Mexico Small Business Assistance (NMSBA) program, which linked him to Gabe Birch at Sandia National Laboratories, whose work focuses on computational and compressive imaging systems used for national security applications. Birch and his team analyzed the company-provided data set of blade damage to wind turbines, developed unsupervised learning anomaly-detection techniques, and refined the resulting algorithms using several hyperparameters to improve the software.
This technical assistance gave ETV the confidence to move forward with these innovative machine learning systems. Now ETV is serving customers in areas such as agriculture, aerospace, renewable energy, critical infrastructure, defense, and public safety. The technology is delivered through KeenAI, ETV’s core technology, which provides end-to-end workflow services to autonomously sense, understand, decide, and act to provide critical, near real-time intelligence on issues affecting operations.
Since they received assistance from NMSBA, the company received $200,000 from the U.S. Navy’s ADAPT (Accelerated Delivery and Acquisition of Prototype Technologies) program, which led to the development of a prototype demonstration. They also won a NASA Phase 1 Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contract leveraging the same technology, were selected for the MassChallenge IBM Artificial Intelligence Mentorship program, and were awarded a State of New Mexico Small Business Innovation Research (NMSBIR) matching grant.