Advanced Optical Systems, Inc. (AOS) is a veteran-owned, private company located in Huntsville, Alabama. At AOS, the focus is pushing state-of-the-art optical technology beyond existing boundaries to solve commercial and military problems and to develop a line of innovative, beneficial and successful products.
AOS founder, Dr. Richard Hartman's deep expertise in missile identification and tracking systems engineering comes from a career at the U.S. Army Missile Command, where he was the Director of Research. Dr. Hartman invented and managed the fabrication of the country's premiere indoor laser radar range, (U.S. Army Missile Optics Range) and development of the U.S.'s smallest optical image processor (featured on cover of SPECTRUM magazine); developed an optical processor system for missile guidance; and started the Army's program in optical processing. Using this optical position, range and location expertise as a base, Dr. Hartman and the AOS team answered a NAVY Phase I SBIR requirement in 1994 with ULTOR ™, an optical based correlator using Fourier transform techniques to perform automatic target recognition and tracking. Since that time, AOS has successfully executed over 33 Phase I SBIR projects leading to 14 Phase IIs. Over the years, AOS built a solid team of engineers and scientists and put in place quality process like ISO9001 and AS9100 to support the delivery of consistently superior hardware and software products. The success of AOS’s work with NASA on space rendezvous and docking technology, and more recent work on autonomous helicopter cargo sling load management has led to over $33M in Phase III funding.