What if you could have eyes beyond the line of sight?

At Circle Optics, we build eyes that let you see beyond line of sight!

Designed for pilots of drones that need to fly beyond the line of sight. The value in this capability is the optimized data collection and sharing capabilities in real time. We are working alongside AUVSI’s Drone Ready Program to contribute to FAA safety regulations as we build this technology.

Eyes For Pilots Beyond The Line of Sight

The FAA mandates today that all drones must be flown within visual line of sight. As a result, many industries are hampered and unable to make full use of drone technology, such as delivery and inspection services

The FAA has established specifications that they regard as being “human-equivalent vision”.

Circle Optics has developed its camera to precisely match FAA specifications so that your drone is in full compliance, having the requisite field of regard and detection range.

Our camera automatically detects potential threats, and cues your navigation system with invaluable track data, well before you need to make a maneuver!

The World’s Most Immersive First Person View Yet

  • First person view cameras (FPV) are mounted to a gimbal today
  • There is latency to moving the camera around, typically with a joystick controller, and multiple people have to share the same view
  • Circle Optics is developing a panoramic first person view camera that gives remote pilot super-human vision beyond the line of sight
  • Imagery can be fed to a Varjo headset with resolution matching that of the human eye, for the most advanced retinal resolution first person view available!
  • We are enabling pilots to have panoramic retinal resolution 70 px per degree that matches the human eye for super advanced sensing for when your drone is out of sight.

Dynamic Viewing

360° imaging allows different people to see different aspects of the view and extra dynamic layers of data

Teams can see what you are seeing and more
Feature Pilots can share what they are seeing with other people, and stay focused on flying while others have a look around (multiple people can view different parts of the panoramic image simultaneously).

Inspection Use Case

As the pilot moves the drone, teams of individuals have an immersive panoramic view of the scenery and can extract their own data from any direction.
Detect and Navigate

Most people are working toward better situational awareness for detecting and avoidance (DAA) of potential collisions. At Circle Optics we are going further. We are enabling the future of detect and navigate through situational consciousness. Situational consciousness is the next level of situation awareness.

Situational Consciousness

When you have a camera system that is so good that the drone or robot can perform autonomously that it has a 3D – 360° environment.
  • Modern autonomous systems have 360-degree situational awareness from multiple cameras pointed in different directions.
  • The video output from these cameras is kept separate and analyzed individually.
  • Recently, Tesla realized the need to combine separate feeds together into a cohesive spherical image of the world. But stitching imagery requires extensive computation power and is often inaccurate.
Circle Optics has developed a novel lens technology where fields of view between cameras conjoin, creating a composite panorama errorlessly at the speed of light.
Rather than combining video feeds after the fact, our feeds are designed to be joined from the start.
The result is an ability to understand the entire environment, 360-degrees around the system, and understand how an action in one part of the environment will influence objects anywhere else in another remote part of the environment.

It also makes it simpler to create 3D photorealistic models of the environment, by starting with the data in spherical form. This is why Tesla has made the move to convert their imagery to 360 before creating what they call the 4D vector space

Beyond Visual Line of Sight (Meeting FAA Requirements)
Currently you cannot operate a UAV beyond line of sight (BVLOS) without a waiver. Less than 1% of waivers are awarded. This means application when you fly further than unaided eye or around obscuring objects like a building or nature you are disallowed to use the drone. The majority of anticipated use cases for UAV will be BVLOS.