Mission

In the 21st century, bigger may not be better. In fact, given new technologies, it is now possible to achieve more with less resources, provided those resources are used intelligently.

Uplift Systems' goal is the creation of workbenches supporting this next-generation of tools. Our current focus is Vehicle health management systems for avionics systems (and we believe our methods extend far beyond that current focus). Airframe and avionics hardware capabilities that previously required the resources of a major government to achieve are now within the reach of industrial and even amateur groups.

In 2004, for example, the privately funded manned SpaceShipOne flew to 100 kilometers (62 miles) in altitude, leaving the Earth's atmosphere. The LV2 airframe of the Portland State Aeronautics Society (PSAS) is hardly as impressive as SpaceShipOne. Nevertheless, PSAS has produced performance-equivalents to standard rocket avionics hardware systems at a fraction of the standard commercial cost. Its PSAS 6-axis Inertial Measurement Unit can be built with standard components for a few hundred dollars, and achieves performance similar to commercial accelerometers costing up to 100 times as much. The PSAS telemetry downlink is based on COTS 802.11b technologies, costs just a few hundred dollars. Equipment purchased for this purpose from commercial vendors might cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Despite these advances in low-cost hardware systems, the software engineering effort required to produce a quality navigation and control system still represents a major investment in time and money. A recent very rough estimate of the commercial cost of development of the current PSAS software base put this cost in the neighborhood of $1M. This cost is disproportionate to the cost of the hardware and airframe.

Worse, it is well understood in the software engineering community that such a large and complex software infrastructure represents a significant risk of serious undiagnosed defects, even when best practices are followed.

So enough is enough. Less is more. More safe, more usable, more extensible. More can be done with less, using model-based AI learning methods.

But you won't believe it unless you try. Become an Uplift partner and see for yourself.