Summary
The Circle Optics team recently attended XPONENTIAL 2026 to engage with leaders across autonomy, defense, sensing, aerospace, and software ecosystems and explore the technologies shaping the future of autonomous systems. Chief Research Officer Andy Kurtz, Vice President of Marketing and Partnerships Jennifer Sertl, and Software Engineer Grace Annese returned with a shared observation: the future of autonomy increasingly depends on better environmental understanding and situational intelligence. Through conversations spanning panoramic sensing, software integration, detect and avoid, and counter UAS applications, the event reinforced why perception systems matter in complex environments. The article explores how Circle Optics’ Pegasus panoramic capture platform fits into an evolving ecosystem where organizations are seeking greater awareness while reducing operational complexity. Read more about the insights, partnerships, and future possibilities shaping the next generation of autonomy.
Insights from the Circle Optics Team at XPONENTIAL 2026
Why Situational Intelligence Matters in the Future of Autonomy
Insights from the Circle Optics Team at XPONENTIAL 2026
When the future of autonomy gathers in one place, the most valuable takeaway is rarely a single technology. It is pattern recognition.
Earlier this month, Circle Optics Chief Research Officer Andy Kurtz, Vice President of Marketing and Partnerships Jennifer Sertl, and Software Engineer Grace Annese attended XPONENTIAL 2026 to engage with leaders across autonomy, aerospace, defense, unmanned systems, sensing technologies, and software integration. Across dozens of conversations, demonstrations, and ecosystem discussions, one thing became increasingly clear: the future of autonomy depends on better environmental understanding.
For Circle Optics, those conversations reinforced why panoramic perception systems such as Pegasus matter.
Machines are being asked to perceive more of the world with greater speed and reliability. Whether supporting autonomous navigation, detect and avoid systems, counter UAS environments, or mission critical monitoring, the challenge is the same: how do systems better understand the full environment around them in real time?
A Shift Toward Full Environment Understanding
Sertl reflected on the broader pattern emerging across conversations, “One theme surfaced repeatedly in conversations across the autonomy ecosystem: perception matters. Organizations are looking for ways to improve environmental understanding while reducing complexity and increasing confidence in decision making.”
Traditional sensing architectures often create fragmented views of the world, requiring multiple cameras, stitching workflows, or downstream computational reconstruction to approximate situational awareness. In dynamic environments, those architectural choices can introduce latency, increase system burden, and add operational complexity.
Circle Optics approaches the challenge differently.
Pegasus was designed to support wide field of regard panoramic perception through low parallax imaging that minimizes the need for stitched reconstruction and downstream correction. Rather than reconstructing the world after acquisition, the goal is to capture more of the environment correctly at acquisition.
For organizations operating in increasingly complex environments, situational intelligence depends on seeing more, understanding more, and responding with greater confidence.
The conference also reinforced a technical reality: autonomy systems are only as valuable as their ability to perform reliably in real environments.
Across conversations involving defense systems, advanced sensing, and autonomy infrastructure, questions repeatedly surfaced around integration, operational readiness, and how systems perform under mission constraints.
For Kurtz, the conference reinforced the importance of perception as a foundational capability for autonomy. “What stood out to me at XPONENTIAL was how much the future of autonomy depends on environmental understanding,” said Kurtz. “As systems become more sophisticated, there is increasing value in technologies that improve situational awareness while reducing operational complexity. The challenge is moving from capability to validated performance in real environments, where perception quality directly influences decision making.”
From Capability to Usability
As panoramic sensing evolves, the challenge becomes more than capturing imagery. It becomes about how systems support better awareness, lower operational complexity, and improve confidence in decision making under real conditions.
For Circle Optics, that means continued validation of Pegasus in applications including detect and avoid, counter UAS environments, and broader mission critical perception systems.
As autonomy systems mature, software increasingly becomes the bridge between technical capability and operational usability. Conversations at XPONENTIAL highlighted growing demand for systems that not only perform technically but are also reliable, actionable, and capable of integrating into larger autonomous ecosystems.
For Annese, one of the most valuable aspects of the event was seeing both sides of the autonomy ecosystem in one place. “It was fascinating to see both the companies building components that go into systems like ours and the many organizations that could ultimately use Pegasus as a building block in theirs,” said Annese. “We have worked closely with Connect Tech to integrate efficient computing into our camera systems, so it was especially meaningful to meet the team in person and show them Pegasus in action.”
Annese also noted how conversations with companies such as Near Earth Autonomy and Avidrone Aerospace reinforced the growing complexity of autonomous systems. “Overall, it was humbling to see just how many components, partnerships, and layers of engineering are required to build safe, reliable autonomous systems,” she said.
For Circle Optics, this reinforces the importance of software integration, real time processing, and translating panoramic perception into information that humans and machines can act upon with confidence.
The future of autonomy will not simply depend on capturing more data. It will depend on making environmental understanding more usable.
Machines will increasingly be asked to operate in uncertain, dynamic, and high stakes environments. Success will depend not simply on movement or automation, but on perception quality, trust, and the ability to understand more of the world in real time.
At Circle Optics, that challenge continues to shape how we think about panoramic sensing, situational intelligence, and what it means to build systems for a safer, smarter, more immersive world.
