By JAMES RISDON
Off the coast of West Wales and Scotland, an eerily unmanned boat is plying the waters of the Irish Sea this month in a series of demonstrations of robotic warfare, dubbed the Unmanned Warrior, for the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy.
The boat itself is unromantically named P950.
It’s designed for the military. It’s dark grey and black.
And it only has one small splash of colour, a red sign with the name of the British weapons industry multinational, BAE Systems, that put the hardware on it so it can be controlled remotely.
It’s also more than 4,200 kilometres away from Halifax.
But tucked away in the guts of the P950 is a software program designed by Deep Vision, a small Dartmouth company comprised of only four people.
Deep Vision’s software is physically located in a box roughly the size of a package of cigarettes.
Even Alan Parslow, Deep Vision’s founder and president, admits it doesn’t look like much. Looks, though, can be deceiving.
That software program is the brains behind the boat’s senses.
It takes the images from two cameras, including one recording in the infrared spectrum, and interprets the rapidly-changing scenes in much the same way as the human brain processes what the eyes see.
These Unmanned Warrior trials are Deep Vision’s chance to land a big, long-term military contract.
And so far things are looking good.
In an interview Tuesday, Parslow said he expects Deep Vision to land a multi-million dollar, long-term contract by January next year.
“We’re now working with other companies to integrate the technology,” he said. “There are about half a dozen companies that we’re talking with now, all (in) the defence industry, except for one, Vision Air Services.”
The president of Deep Vision is already talking about hiring six more employees and opening up an office south of London, England, if the Unmanned Warrior trials go well.
Although Parslow will not divulge his company’s revenues, he did say he is expecting to see Deep Vision triple in size over the coming year.
A subsidiary with an office in England would allow Deep Vision to take advantage of the growing interest in the marine industry for technology which can accurately and safely track where a vessel is at any given moment and perhaps eventually make it autonomous. Think of it as a fail-safe, a way of cutting down on liability.
“That seems to be the biggest explosion (in interest) right now, in the maritime stuff and not just for cargo ships but all vessels,” said Parslow.
In a strange twist of fate, this company which makes software for British military equipment wound up being located in Dartmouth for no other reason that, well, love.
When he was 26 years old, Parslow stayed for a while at a youth hostel in Denmark and there met a young woman, Canadian Mary Kate Needler.
The two fell in love, married, and lived in London for three years.
Then Needler got homesick for her hometown of Dartmouth. The couple moved to Nova Scotia. Parslow completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a minor in mathematics and later founded Deep Vision, intending its software to be used for medical imaging technology.
That was 16 years ago and Parslow started Deep Vision with only $20,000. He won’t say what it’s worth now. Along the way there was financing provided by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and that money has since been paid back in full.
The medical imaging technology sector, though, turned out to be a bust for Deep Vision and so Parslow turned the company’s attention to the defence sector and chose to work with the government and companies in the United Kingdom because this would allow Deep Vision to retain the intellectual property rights.
“The United Kingdom doesn’t want the intellectual property,” he said. “We own it all. 100 per cent. Whereas, if we worked with Canada’s ministry of defence, we would have none of it.”
When Deep Vision starts adding staff, Parslow says he’ll be looking at freshly-minted science graduates who are free of pre-conceived notions of how things should be done. Tuesday, he said Deep Vision might also approach ACOA again for financing to help set up its U.K. subsidiary.
In theory, Deep Vision’s software could also make sense of information coming to it from motion sensors, chemical detectors that are sometimes called artificial noses, microphones, and a wide variety of other devices. It’s a vital aspect in the quest to make many machines that are truly independent of human operators to carry out their tasks and it will work on any vessel, in the water or under it, on land or in the air — even in space.
It’s also the kind of technology that can help the armed forces get to a wounded soldier on the battlefield. And there are a vast number of potential civilian applications.
Parslow is optimistic.
“It’s been a long, tough ride but we’re getting there,” he said.
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Source: The Chronicle Herald
