Navitar, Inc., a manufacturer of precision optical solutions, announced today the formation of a Sensor Integration business unit at their Rochester, New York facility dedicated to increasing the firm’s capabilities to support applications such as VR cameras, autonomous vehicles, drones and surveillance systems. Robert Podlena will lead the new group as Vice President, Sensor Integration.
According to Jeremy Goldstein, Co-CEO of Navitar, “The intent of this new business unit is to increase our capabilities to produce fully integrated, actively aligned lens and camera modules for customers within the computer vision industry. Today’s advanced imaging applications such as VR, AR, UAV, drone, autonomous vehicles and surveillance require maximum image quality and consistently high performance across all units. Navitar can now give these customers exactly what they are looking for.”
Robert Podlena, previously Director of Engineering at Navitar, has over 30 years of experience in engineering and management, and has been integral to the manufacturing organization’s entry into the lens and sensor integration business. Podlena remarks, “Manual lens-to-camera mounting methods simply cannot achieve the level of accuracy required to produce the resolution necessary for these advanced computer vision and imaging applications. Automated alignment allows positioning accuracies of < 2µm and angular accuracies in minutes ensuring peak resolution of the sensor/lens assembly.”
Navitar will add additional alignment and test equipment to their recently expanded ISO Class 7 clean room allowing the capacity to meet the broad needs of these exacting customers. Additionally, the Sensor Integration group will immediately begin producing camera modules combining Navitar large format, athermal HDR lenses with Pixelink (acquired by Navitar January 2017) standard sensor boards using Sony IMX CMOS sensors, to be sold as off-the-shelf products.
Additional appointments to the Sensor Integration team include Brendon Evans and Vitus Weber. Evans and Weber, both part of the Navitar engineering department for over 10 years, bring specialized technical skills, systems process engineering expertise and a commitment to a customer success.
