Rapid Imaging Software (RIS)

Transcript

00:00:00 some people just want to sit in the best seat in the house others actually want to create it take Mike abery abery runs a small company called rapid imaging software or RIS in Albuquerque New Mexico only five employees though they have an office at Kirtland Air Force bace they often work right from their homes R is small but they have

00:00:26 successfully accomplished very big things and in very smart way ways abery feels their size as one of their strengths in the development of some technical ideas a very small highly motivated team which is not distracted by many other things is able to make much faster progress than an army of people plotting through mountains of paperwork RIS has been developing

00:00:53 software since the mid 1980s their mission was to put a scientific visualization program on a PC making it easier to own and easier to use for a lot more people it was in the mid 1990s when things began to take off for RIS literally at the time they started to work on a software product line called landform landform allows users to fly a vehicle through virtual terrain with

00:01:21 very unique visual enhancements originally landform was designed with environmental and civil engineers in mind but RIS discovered that one of their biggest customers was NASA the company found that the software was suited for other applications specifically flight visualization enter the small business Innovation research or sbir program with

00:01:46 NASA already using their software RIS felt they could provide something NASA needed we had a vision of being able to create a toolkit that would allow NASA engineers and ultimately like commercial Engineers to be able to put a flight visualization system inside their application with funding through an SB award from Johnson Space Center RIS developed a new version of landform

00:02:13 called smart cam 3D Smart cam 3D takes flight video and overlays three-dimensional geographical information which then enhances the video and also provides a safety measure for the pilot and the vehicle the software requires no special hardware and runs on inexpensive computers making it highly portable and inexpensive RIS has done what it set out

00:02:39 to do take complicated software and made it easy to use on a desktop set with a click and drag interface this got NASA's attention and teaming with NASA was perfect for RIS the reason NASA is such an important partner for this is there's some of the few people around who do experiments with flight smart cam 3D has been used by NASA astronauts to Pilot an unmanned

00:03:04 aerial vehicle or UAV known as the x38 the cameras on board the x38 provided the video and the graphics came from geographical information system or GIS data as the astronauts flew the UAV from a remote cockpit on the ground the primary benefit for us lay in the fact that we were able to test our software on flying aircraft there are very few other places

00:03:34 in the world that we could do that and no place that has um the quality of resources and the understanding of flight that NASA has abery is very excited because the company's software is not just a NASA success it's also an outside success the company works with customers like the Canadian Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration to develop the most appropriate

00:03:58 interface to fit their needs when the NASA astronauts were flying the x38 model they suggested that the company consider applications for other uavs today RIS is working with the US Army to flight test the Army's Shadow tactical UAV using RIS software abery has set goals for what his company can accomplish and he believes that some of the best seats in the house will use RIS

00:04:25 software in the future we're going to have the opportunity to take this technology that we've developed doing something we love and then Infuse that into the commercial sector people eventually flying riding in airliners across the country or flying small general aviation aircraft which I predict we're going to see a little upswinging in that part of Aviation are

00:04:47 going to be deriving the benefits of this technology for years to come