The six services below form one chain. A client may enter at any station, but every engagement ends the same way: a platform that holds a named reference, a procedure a technician can repeat, and a written record that survives an audit.
Adaptavist Inc. opens its winter alignment cycle, with bench time at 12110 Sunset Hills Rd Ste 600, Reston - 20190-5916, United States (US) now being reserved for returning platforms.
Descriptions below are deliberately concrete. They describe the work we take responsibility for, the evidence we hand over, and the point at which the client team must be involved. If a programme needs something outside these lines, we say so early rather than absorbing it quietly.
We design two and three axis gimbal assemblies for payloads that must stay level while their host pitches and rolls. The work begins with the motion profile of the vehicle or foundation, because that profile decides ring stiffness, bearing preload and drive sizing. A platform that is designed before the motion is known will either be too heavy or too soft, and both failures appear only after installation.
Mechanically, we specify bearing stacks that keep play out of the axis without adding drag, ring sections that place material where bending moments are highest, and drive trains that can hold position through small disturbances without hunting. Electrically, the platform carries its own sensing and a local controller so that the host system only needs to send a demand and read a status word. We supply the drawings, the assembly procedure and the acceptance motion test.
Sensor fusion is the software that turns several imperfect measurements into one attitude estimate good enough to control against. We work with gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers and external aiding such as a heading reference or a mechanical datum. The hard part is never the mathematics on a clean bench; it is the weighting of sensors when vibration, temperature and magnetic disturbance all arrive at once.
Our approach is to record the platform in its real environment, then tune and validate the filter against that record. We deliver the firmware, the tuning parameters, the test data set and a short note explaining why each weight was chosen. When a client later changes a sensor, the note tells them which part of the estimate will move and how to re-verify it without repeating the entire programme.
A calibration loop is the closed procedure that returns a platform to a known reference and demonstrates that it arrived. We write these loops with the technician in mind: few live decisions, clear residuals, and a fixture that makes the wrong assembly physically difficult. The loop is documented with tolerances, drift budgets and a repeatability figure measured across several operators.
Loops are validated against a traceable standard and then re-validated at intervals agreed with the client. Where a platform is used in a regulated setting, the loop record is designed to satisfy the auditor as well as the engineer. Our calibration work seldom stops at a single platform; most clients ask us to design loops for a family of instruments so that the whole fleet behaves consistently.
Integration is the discipline of making separately supplied parts behave as one machine. We take on the interfaces that vendors rarely own: the handshake between a drive and a safety relay, the timing between a supervisory controller and a sensor, the fault tree that decides what the machine does when a subsystem disappears. These are the points where integrated systems fail months after commissioning.
Our deliverable is a working cell plus an interface document that names every signal, its source, its expected range and its behaviour under fault. We test the cell under the load profile it will actually meet, not a nominal one, and we record the result. Clients receive a machine they can maintain and a map they can hand to a new controls engineer without a long oral history.
A test rig must reproduce the conditions that matter and remain honest about the ones it cannot. We design rigs for motion, temperature and load, and we design the fixture and the data acquisition at the same time. When these are designed separately the rig usually measures its own compliance rather than the product, and the resulting charts are difficult to defend.
Each rig is delivered with a characterisation report: its own natural frequencies, its limits, and the conditions under which its readings should be trusted. We also build the acceptance test that the client will run on production units, so that the rig becomes a permanent part of quality control rather than a one-off engineering exercise that is dismantled after the first campaign.
Transport, foundations and climate move a reference in ways no laboratory can predict. Our field engineers travel to the installed platform, re-establish the reference on site, and leave a signed record of the work. The visit includes a survey of the mounting structure, a check for drift since the last alignment, and a short adjustment session with the local maintenance team so the procedure is known in house.
Field alignment often reveals a design issue that only appears once the machine is in place, such as a foundation that settles unevenly under load. We report these findings with photographs and measurements, and where the fix is within our scope we propose it with a cost and a schedule. Where it is not, we say so plainly and identify the specialist the client should contact.
Every programme passes the same four gates. Each gate produces a short document and a decision, and no gate is skipped because the client is in a hurry. The discipline is what keeps a schedule honest.
We record the structure, the existing sensors and the way the machine is used. The output is a written baseline with measured behaviour, reference options and a budget in mass, power and cost. Clients often discover at this gate that the real problem is not the one in the original brief.
Drawings and calculations are reviewed with the client engineering team around a table. The review covers bearing choice, ring stiffness, sensor placement and control architecture. Decisions are recorded with the reason behind them so that later changes can be judged against the original intent.
The platform is assembled and calibrated on the bench against a traceable standard. Residuals are recorded, and any part of the design that did not meet its predicted behaviour is noted rather than quietly adjusted. The bench report becomes the reference for everything that follows.
The platform is aligned where it will live, under the conditions it will meet. The acceptance record includes ambient conditions, instrument used, residual figures and the signature of both parties. This is the document that answers questions years later.