BLOGS

During the days when the founders of ANELLO Photonics were talking to customers to see if the idea of building a Silicon Photonics Optical Gyro (SiPhOGTM) made sense, the head of sensors of an autonomous car company told them about two Fiber Optics Gyros sitting on his shelf and that they did not use because they were too big, too bulky and too expensive to be deployed in volume.

Some problems settle into the background of how industries operate and get accepted as permanent fixtures simply because no one has yet offered a convincing alternative. For the organizations responsible for inspecting powerlines, monitoring pipelines, supplying offshore platforms, or responding to emergencies in remote terrain, the dependence on manned helicopter operations has been exactly that kind of problem.

Imagine a drone mid-flight autonomously navigating its course. It could be carrying a medical delivery to a remote village, surveying farmland for crop health, or conducting a critical surveillance mission in a conflict zone. Then, without warning, the signal dies. Simply because someone, somewhere, flipped a switch on a pocket-sized device, and the Global Positioning System (GPS) went dark.