From the Lab · Gene Avakyan

Machines That See

Edison Aerospace takes on DARPA and Navy SBIR work in autonomy and machine vision

September 17, 2026 · by Gene Avakyan

Machines That See: Edison Aerospace Takes On DARPA and Navy SBIR Work in Autonomy

A machine that cannot see cannot act on its own. Everything else in autonomy starts there.

Edison Aerospace is submitting several Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) proposals for DARPA and the U.S. Navy. The specifics stay private for now. The subject does not: autonomous operations and machine vision. More will be shared when it can be. Until then, the lab is humming, and the whiteboards are full.

Why Autonomy Lives or Dies at the Edge

Picture a drone over open water, or a sensor on the deck of a ship. There is no guarantee of a fast internet connection. There may be no connection at all. Any machine that has to wait for a distant data center to tell it what it is looking at is already too slow.

So the thinking has to happen on the device itself. That idea has a name: edge AI. And computer vision remains the leading use of edge AI, with the trend moving from small tests to real, full-scale deployments.[4] The hard part is not getting a model to spot a car on a powerful desktop. The hard part is getting it to spot the car, track it, and judge what it is doing, all on a small, low-power board that fits in the palm of a hand.

A Single Frame From the Lab

Two side-by-side development test windows, one running on a Raspberry Pi and one on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, each tracking the same vehicles with matching ID numbers, confidence scores, and movement labels.
Same clip, same second, two different computers, the same answers.

What Comes Next

Autonomy is no longer a science project. It is the next layer of how ships, aircraft, and ground systems do their jobs, and the Pentagon’s own SBIR push says as much. The companies that matter in this space will be the ones whose machines see clearly, decide quickly, and give the same answer every time.

Edison Aerospace is doing that work right now. The proposals are in motion. The lab is busy. The details will come later.

Stay tuned.

Gene Avakyan is the CEO of VUGA Group, whose portfolio includes Edison Aerospace LLC, an aerospace research and development company. He holds degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from UCLA and an MBA from Pepperdine, as well as graduate work in Mechanical Engineering at SDSU.

References

  1. Inside Government Contracts (Covington & Burling), “SBIR/STTR Is Back and the Department of War Is Wasting No Time,” April 30, 2026 — link
  2. Eva Garland Consulting, “SBIR Reauthorization: Where We Stand” — link
  3. Granted AI, “DOD SBIR Restart: First Post-Reauthorization Topics and Timelines,” March 4, 2026 — link
  4. Dell Technologies, “The Power of Small: Edge AI Predictions for 2026,” Jan. 7, 2026 — link
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