What We Do

We Engineer Capabilities

At Draper, our core capabilities are the backbone of our solutions.

Once a need is identified, our engineers can begin formulating a concept and developing each component to achieve a field-ready prototype or combine existing technologies in new ways.

Our engineers apply multi-disciplinary approaches that deliver new capabilities to customers. 

Inertial Measurement

Our Inertial Measurement capability enables guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) systems and instruments that do not rely on any external references for navigation. For high accuracy in harsh environments, our inertial design and development work includes the strapdown and gimballed systems used in land, sea, air, and space systems. Our designs involve instruments and sensors in a variety of technologies, including mechanical, optical and micro-optical, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and atom-based, to meet customers' performance, cost, and size goals across a wide range of environments for applications ranging from strategic military platforms to squad-level systems to commercial systems.

Guidance, Navigation, and Control

We develop enabling guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) system solutions that provide our customers with needed mission capability in both defense and civil applications. Combining deep expertise in precision instrumentation, fault-tolerant electronics, and advanced GN&C/autonomy software, we innovate integrated solutions for our sponsors' most challenging missions, including global strike, hypersonic/re-entry applications, gun-launched systems, rendezvous and proximity operations, as well as miniaturized solutions for autonomous systems in challenging environments: the contested spectrum battlefield, GPS-unavailable environments, harsh radiation and more. The technologies we're advancing in this domain include vision-aided GN&C, celestial navigation, multi-sensor data fusion, advanced sensing and instruments, multi-agent collaborative GN&C/autonomy, and more.

Physical Sensing and Timing

To sense, monitor, and control an environment, we design and develop devices with precision electronics to collect and process data in a variety of formats, fusing data in heterogeneous formats. Timing devices to perform precision time transfer (e.g., portable atomic clocks) to support communications, imaging, and rangefinding technology using innovative optics and photonics, and quantum sensors, we can combine technologies in creative ways to provide needed performance, even while reducing size, weight and power. We're enabling new, SWaP-constrained solutions in challenging environments (e.g., GPS-challenged).

High Assurance Systems

Our systems engineering approach enables the design, development, and test of complex, dynamic, High Assurance Systems (HAS) that are safe, reliable, resilient, and secure in their intended operational environments. We integrate our unique variety of specialty engineering capabilities, which span fault-tolerant system design, reliability engineering, radiation tolerance and hardening, safety, and security, among others, into HAS design. Our continuous investments in digital engineering enable simulations, analyses, and testing across the full development lifecycle, allowing our deep pool of engineering talent to produce world-class solutions for the challenges faced by HAS owners and their ultimate goal of assuring mission outcomes.

Design for Harsh Environments

To enable systems to perform despite the effects of extreme environments, we draw on decades of experience designing for harsh operating conditions. We create specialized hardware, algorithms, and software that are integrated into systems that are robust and resilient in challenging conditions. They enable not only performance but survivability and recovery from adverse events and circumstances when exposed to radiation, temperature extremes, high pressure, corrosive conditions, shock, vibration, and more. In addition to high-fidelity models and simulations of challenging environments, our facilities provide an environment to test prototypes under these varieties of difficult conditions. Our design expertise delivers reliable technology.

Complex System Miniaturization

Working within challenging system requirements for size, weight, and power, while meeting customer performance standards, we design low-SWaP complex systems and components. Miniaturizing through a systems approach, our engineers take into account the many facets of a system: custom digital and analog electronics, custom ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) and communication technologies, MEMS and other sensors, novel power sources, and ultra-compact packaging technologies. We combine these technologies to meet the unique needs of customers, military or commercial. We can insert enhanced functionality into existing technology or design something new, such as medical devices (pediatric heart valves, neural stimulation electronics, or sensors).

Communications and RF Systems

To provide end-to-end communications solutions, we create mission-specific system architecture designs for various domains, including undersea and space. Our technology expertise includes radio frequency (RF) hardware design and implementation, software-defined radio (SDR)-based solutions, and custom signal processing. We develop RF-based systems for electronic warfare (EW), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), satellite communications, and counter-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) applications, among other uses.

Cyber-Physical Systems Security

Our substantial experience designing cyber-physical systems benefits not only the performance of these systems, it also informs the approach our engineers take in designing security into them. Our engineers use their insight into the nature of vulnerabilities to protect systems through the secure development of software and hardware. Our approach is comprehensive, employing state-of-the-art applied security research that leverages formal methods, network and system security, advanced packaging, secure processors, and offensive cyber security. Custom microelectronics with extensive security provisions are coupled with secure software development along with strong cryptography to achieve secure and assured systems.

Human-System Engineering

Human-centered engineering creates solutions to optimize human performance and stretch human capabilities. Identifying and baselining user needs early drives design and shapes adaptive systems to detect, identify, and respond to human signals effectively and efficiently. UI/UX design optimizes the interface and interaction between human and system, ensuring mission goals are readily achievable. Human-system performance testing and analysis conducted throughout development evaluate the operational impact of solutions, ensuring systems optimize situational awareness and decision-making for all users. This expertise enables us to develop new tools and methods for human-signals understanding within a complex, dynamic surround, where actionable information is key to success.

Data Analytics and Machine Learning

Within the context of specific domain applications, the systems we design collect and fuse data in real time and apply analytics techniques to extract meaningful information from processed data sets to give users a better understanding of complex, dynamic processes. We can fuse data from diverse and heterogeneous sources, including imagery, video, audio, social media, and others, and automate the analysis of large data sets with algorithms. Optimized coupling of data acquisition and machine learning-based analysis enables the ability to glean insight during operations and exploit it in real time.

Autonomy and Perception Software

We are a leader in the design, development, integration, and testing of algorithms and software for autonomous systems. We have developed reusable autonomy architectures that enable full mission autonomy for single- and multi-agent applications across many complex domains: underwater, terrestrial, aerial, and space. Our reusable frameworks are implemented within a digital engineering environment, which ensures new mission capabilities can be developed and tested quickly and robustly. Our design principles take into account human-machine interaction, enabling the development of operator-trusted technology for national security, and civil and commercial uses.

Electromechanical Systems

We design and develop electromechanical systems, delivering solutions for air, ground, and undersea applications leveraging robotics, articulated systems, and novel structures. Whether designing from scratch or adapting commercial technology, we have a full complement of fabrication facilities, including world-class machining and micromachining, additive manufacturing of polymers and metals, wafer-level processing, and a comprehensive electronics assembly facility. We also work with advanced materials, including the development and integration of biomaterials, chemical and electrochemical materials, and exotic structural materials, as needed. By combining complex design with advanced analyses that is informed by manufacturing expertise, we deliver systems for real-world applications in harsh environments.

Bioprocessing and Synthetic Biology

We use microfluidics, cell and molecular biology, and complex instrumentation to design biological systems and develop prototype technologies compatible with a wide range of biological materials, ranging in size scale from the molecular level up to the cell and tissue level. Drawing on our knowledge of immunology and microfluidics, we design and develop manufacturing tools for cellular therapies. We engineer new capabilities by seamlessly integrating novel biological systems with custom hardware for a wide range of applications, including controlled DNA synthesis, cellular therapy manufacturing, detection, diagnostics, high-throughput R&D, and therapeutic screening.

Organ on a Chip

Using a custom-designed multiplexed dynamic tissue culture platform and organ tissue models on chips, we offer customers a high-throughput, tunable organ-on-chip (OOC) microenvironment that can generate physiologically relevant responses in human organ tissue models to accelerate drug discovery, toxicity screening, and efficacy testing for therapeutics and vaccines. The PREDICT96 platform has an instrumented microfluidic culture plate (MCP) in the standard 384-well plate footprint that supports 96 individual OOCs or arrayed multi-organ systems simultaneously, with sensors to monitor individual OOCs. Our biologists and engineers work together seamlessly to expand the capabilities of the platform, including real-time sensing, high-resolution imaging, and data analytics.

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