Benjamin Chaco

As the Software Lead for a multi-sensor surveillance system for the DoD, I have provided technical leadership to a team of 9 engineers. The project is a gimbal-based sensor system that consists of a midwave infrared thermal sensor, electro-optical and low-light visible sensors, and a laser range finder on a gimbal-based platform. The system includes software for sensor control, GigE Vision video, object detection and tracking, advanced image processing and gimbal control. My contributions to the project include:

• Collaboration with Electrical, Mechanical, and Systems Engineering teams to ensure the successful delivery of a well designed, robust product that meets the customers requirements and provides headroom for future growth.
• Development of a Yocto/OpenEmbedded project based on a Xilinx zynqmp (Ultrascale+) SoM, including meta-layer and recipe construction.
• Design and implementation of a Linux software stack (C++, Java) that communicates with a FreeRTOS realtime stack (C++) using the OpenAmp framework for asymmetric multiprocessing.
• Software development for interfacing with multiple sensors and devices using several different protocols such as RS232/RS422, I2C, and memory-mapped I/O.

• Company Overview: Formerly FLIR UGS, Endeavor Robotics, iRobot Defense&Security
• Designed, developed and delivered complex software systems for Unmanned Ground Vehicles from Operator Control Units to robotic platforms used for explosive ordnance disposal, reconnaissance and situational awareness
• Implemented low-latency, live-streaming video solutions for streaming multiple HD video streams from multiple image sensors to multiple operator control units (OCUs) over a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET)
• Client side video pipelines were developed up to handle zero-latency de-multiplexing and decoding in bandwidth limited Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET)
• Diagnosed and tuned client and server side video streaming issues for H264 AVC and MPEG2 encoded video streams
• Tuned video framerate, bitrate, I-frame interval, and transport protocol for performance in non-line-of-sight use cases over RF mesh networks
• Investigated and root-caused critical bugs in a custom Linux kernel device driver that multiplexes four OmniVision digital image sensors into a single input on a TI OMAP3 board, improving the quality and the glass-to-glass video pipeline latency
• Constructed custom GStreamer image capture source-plugins (C/C++) for analog and digital image sensors (optical, IR/thermal, GigE) as well as client-side C++ and Java/Android based cross-platform video player optimized for low-bandwidth live-streaming using the FFMpeg open-source libraries
• Worked on board bring up for IMX8 System-on-Module (SoM) carrier boards under Linux based OSs
• Implementation of the Device Tree specification (DTS) for a Target Acquisition Payload (TAP) platform for robotic systems
• Provide software platform abstractions for GPIO handling for platform illumination, power and camera activation
• Provide technical leadership for video streaming, camera control, protocol implementations and network transports (on top of RF, Ethernet, Fiber-optic mediums) for multiple commercial and DoD UGS products including FirstLook 110, PackBot 510/525, SUGV 310, and Kobra 725
• Optimizations for UDP multicast over bandwidth-restricted RF networks
• Designed, developed and tested the camera control subsystem software for the uPoint Multi Robot Controller (MRC) Android-based rugged operator control unit tablets proving clients on the RF mesh network control over video streaming, pan/tilt/zoom, gain, exposure, lighting and other resource management services for optical, night-vision, and thermal image sensors

• Developed software for high speed data acquisition systems for radio astronomy (VLBI) and autonomous vehicle research using C++, image-processing, GPU/Cuda acceleration, H264 AVC and MPEG4 video processing distributed linux systems

• Company Overview: Formerly Seaweed Systems
• Designed developed and tested 2D and 3D graphics drivers for DO178b safety critical systems
• Implemented X11R6 XWindows (R6) server graphics drivers, OpenGL-ES, OpenGL-SC, GLX and EGL library implementations for real-time embedded systems including VxWorks, Integrity, LynxOs, and desktop Linux (RHEL on PPC)
• Designed a cross platform abstraction layer for porting to various RTOSs including DO178b qualified systems: VxWorks, Integrity, and WindRiver Linux
• Implemented the video-as-a-texture feature for the the company's flagship SeaWind graphics drivers as an OpenGL extension that allowed video frames to be directly written into video device memory to be used by user-space software for texture mapping operations
• Enhanced the SeaWind OpenGL and X11 drivers by integrating and synchronizing the hardware accelerated 3D rendering (DMA) and legacy 2D direct framebuffer rendering (PIO) to shared surfaces (video memory) for X11 direct-rendering

• Worked on the design and development of C++ software for automatic target recognition (ATR) for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery
• Designed and implemented image processing and signal processing software for a distributed target recognition system using parallel processing, generic programming, TCP network programming for Solaris and Linux platforms

• Details available upon request

• Details available upon request

• Details available upon request

• Details available upon request