The Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada (EDAWN) announced today that Ashima Devices, a Pasadena-based company known for its research in advanced autonomous aerial vehicles, will be moving its headquarters and opening a research, testing and assembly facility in Reno. The relocation is expected to bring up to 400 quality jobs to the area.
Ashima Devices Vice President, Larry B. Lambert, credited Governor Sandoval’s Office of Economic Development and the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada (EDAWN) for the move to Nevada.
“Nevada’s can-do attitude combined with a willing and ready workforce of educated, quality people who are interested in being part of the unmanned aerial vehicle revolution made it a perfect place to expand.”
Chief Executive Officer, Mark Richardson, said, “We’re excited to be opening this new facility in Reno and in working with the University of Nevada collaboratively on upcoming projects that will help students hone their skills in conjunction with Ashima Devices and better prepare them for their entry into occupational fields focused on advanced robotics systems and control, computing sensing and communication systems and in the burgeoning field of UAVs.”
Six electrically powered ducted fan (jet) engines, encased in the small aircraft’s fuselage, propel the Ashima’s UAV’s that appear to be something between a Frisbee and a hockey puck.
The engine design provides safe, eco-friendly propulsion. Advanced sensors provide HAZMAT responders the ability to know what hazardous materials they are encountering and in what concentration before sending people into harm’s way.
Ashima Devices will complete testing and begin selling ground penetrating radar systems that will fly on its UAVs in 2015. Saving lives threatened by improvised explosive devices and landmines worldwide will the change the nature of sweeping for explosive mines, separating the sweeper in distance from explosives while providing a far more accurate view of the object. The device is also anticipated to help law enforcement search for evidentiary objects that have been concealed underground.
Ashima Devices began its corporate life in 2011 as a merging of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Scientists, professors from the California Institute of Technology, military special forces officers and law enforcement personnel, who focused on affordable, autonomous, short-range, small UAVs.
