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A few passing clouds. Low 62F. Winds light and variable.
Tough Stump's Gadgets for the Afternoon
Artemis the Drone preparing for liftoff.
eBee Tac affectionately known as Artemis the Drone
Drone photos are transformed into real-time maps.
Tough Stump's Office in Action
Goose is on the move.
Atos lives on through ATOS
One of these things is not like the other.
eBee Tac affectionately known as Artemis the Drone
Goose is on the move.
Quite often, movies don't live up to the hype or the previews. Businesses can be even worse.
“Business propaganda” is the official term for deceptive spouting. Any infomercial is a classic example. If it sounds too good to be true, it generally is. Tough Stump, a quiet yet notable business that just purchased 75 wooded acres along Vass-Carthage Road for $1.28 million, certainly seems to be the exception to that rule.
Last week, in a scrubby patch of Moore County near Carthage, Tough Stump performed to a thunderstruck group of prospective patrons. Stealth-like drones and robotic, bulletproof dogs sped through the sky and across the terrain. Mimicking a world Jarrett “Fish” Heavenston calls “the disconnected,” these pseudo tiny soldiers gathered real-time 3D information, solved topographical riddles and generated more squeals than would be expected from the burly out-of-towners who were each wearing at least one American flag.
To see it was to believe it — maybe — and even then, it seemed likely that a movie director would appear from behind a film crew and roar, “Cut!”
Artemis the Drone preparing for liftoff.
Heavenston is a 25-year veteran and the CEO of Tough Stump Technologies, a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business in Southern Pines. During his service, Heavenston served with the 2nd Ranger Battalion as a Jungle Warfare Instructor and with the US Army Special Operations Command, and in the Air Force as a Combat Controller. He deployed 12 times to Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa developing air infrastructure and controlling close air support for Special Operations Forces. He retired in 2016 and founded Tough Stump Technologies.
On paper, Tough Stump’s business pitch includes “unmanned systems providing mapping and situational awareness for particular problems in particular situations” and “a white glove company that solves tough problems with tailored solutions.”
One of these things is not like the other.
Cut. Yawn. Cue us back to that shot earlier, that jaw-dropping demonstration back in the fields of Carthage.
With excitement and exhilaration comes thinking and training, and Heavenston has always been a tinkerer and a thinker. As a boy growing up in California, he wanted to “be outside, work with my hands, and take apart stuff, then put it together, but better.”
He admits to loving and pondering the phrase “skate to where the puck is going to be” so much as a child that he used that philosophy to determine what path of business to take. It would later become part of Tough Stump’s business philosophy.
When he thought about the problems from his military missions around the world, he was certain that mapping was a small word for an enormous problem. He spent years brainstorming an idea for his company. Solving mapping issues, he said, “was the first stone to make it all the way across the pond.”
Tough Stump mapping is much different, however, from Grandpa’s folded maps in the glove compartment or Apple Maps directing the Uber Eats guy.
Using his skill set, military background, and mapping prowess, he figured there were three essential questions that Tough Stump was going to set out to answer for its clients: Where am I? What is going on around me? What is my purpose in it?
Rising Action: The Problem with Maps
In any potentially dangerous situation, the unknown is as much the enemy as the enemy.
The corporate office of Tough Stump is full of framed maps of all kinds: raggedy military scraps of paper with handwritten notes of longitudes and latitudes, glossy frames with Heavenston’s grandfather’s journeys alongside his medals.
“I have always been fascinated by maps,” he said. “Everytime I see one, I just stop and pause.”
While maps have always been an essential worker in the toolbox of a soldier, Heavenston knew that they were far from perfect. Maps are photos or drawings of what someone a long time ago — usually a long way away — determined was reality. Most maps are flat and two dimensional. Even the best maps are not in real time. Even in the luxury of your own car, with a navigation system and Google maps, we have all ended up lost or using old data.
There is an even more dangerous problem than just the frustration of inaccurate maps, according to Heavenston, and it doesn’t matter if you are the good guy, the bad guy or the lost guy.
Drone photos are transformed into real-time maps.
“Terrain does not take a side; it’s just there,” he said. As a jungle warfare instructor, he is adamant that, “You can not beat the jungle. The only method of survival is to learn how to accept the environment.” Be the jungle.
Heavenston frequently uses the phrase “situational awareness” and it is much more than being able to read the room. It is safe to say that most of Tough Stump’s customers do not have wifi or cell service at the disaster site, in the caves or hills of a mission or in a war-torn distant village. They do not have real time intel on the topography or the activity at the location.
“Even in our everyday lives,” he says, “these are big issues but in the disconnected world, not having any idea of what is around you or being able to effectively communicate are more than inconveniences: they are a matter of life or death."
Heavenston knew that finding the answers to “where am I” and “what is going on” were intertwined with accurate real-time 3D mapping and effective precise location tracking of all actors involved.
Tough Stump had skated to its first two pucks. It had to make better mapping and fix real-time tracking and communication. Getting the pucks in was another matter.
The Conflict: The Wheel of Death
These days most of the world can relate to “my computer is too slow” or that a full phone memory is cramping your style. When computers or smartphones attempt to gather too much information, the “wheel of death” or the infamous black screen appears. The primary reason? Heavenston explained, “Processing too much data can almost destroy any computer.” The secondary problem? No one on site is as smart as the people who designed this fracas, it’s way too complicated for most people to understand, and now what?
In the world of Tough Stump, the team knew this was another danger in the world of disconnection: even if the accuracies of the mapping and the location were resolved, without a resource to process the information, without clarity or user-friendly explanations, no one could answer what it is that they need to do next.
A battlefield is not the place to wait around for a download or to call IT and ask for an explanation. As part of Tough Stump’s package for clients, Heavenston knew that a powerful, heavy duty, user-friendly processing beast in the form of a rugged laptop was a necessity.
The Tough Stump solvers had pinpointed their final solution.
Tough Stump's Office in Action
Fish had begun using drones before he retired from the military, so he had an idea of where the science was headed.
Over the last 20 years, the concepts attached to tracking and GPS had evolved alongside the speed of technology. The Tough Stuff smart tank knew the best tracking available was ATAK. Then they wondered if they could improve it.
ATAK — Android Team Awareness Kit — changed the world dramatically and yet most people have no idea what it is. It is to tracking what the wheel was for transportation.
Along with being able to identify the location of anyone or anything significant, imagine being able to coordinate rescues, respond to criminal activity, identify infrastructure gaps and establish perimeters in high stress, high stakes, hazardous environments in real-time, through a silent lightweight screen that can easily be attached anywhere accessible.
Typically, the military, first responders, the National Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, local Emergency Management Agencies and American Red Cross all communicate separately and through their own radio transmissions.
ATAK allows everyone to visually understand the action in any given situation on their own screen. It is an app developed by the U.S. government that allows users to communicate and see each other on a map (or something that has been tagged – including weather and bad guys). It can also set geofencing and send alerts if a user enters or leaves the fence. Any of this information or communication sent can be set for user-to-user, user-to-select teams, user-to-command post or user-to-entire force (even if they are from different agencies). It also allows texting and file, photo and video sharing.
While ATAK does rely on GPS for location data, a mesh node attached to the phone can provide connectivity when the location is off-the-grid intentionally, in an area where service does not exist, or when service is down due to an event or disaster. “Mesh networking” puts everyone back on-the-grid.
Tough Stump took ATAK and mesh networking a step further. By designing a plugin to ATAK called ATOS, tagging became even easier. Instead of being attached to a cell phone, hundreds of small tags can be added to anything.
Tough Stump's Gadgets for the Afternoon
What is Going On Around Me?
The Tough Stump crew then set about adding the mapping component to the tracking component.
From their military background, all of the Tough Stump employees knew that photogrammetry was the likely answer. Photogrammetry is the science of making measurements from photographs. Those measurements in this instance become real-time maps. A camera moves along a path quickly (either by air or ground) and takes thousands of overlapping photographs. The photos are downloaded and processed by a computer program that then produces a 3D “cartoon-like” rendition of the area photographed. Similar to a virtual reality video game, the realistic, almost instant product is the “greatest possible answer to ‘where am I?”
What is the Purpose of This?
With such a wide variety of first responders and levels of non-military understanding, Tough Stump saw the difficulty of “translating” the intricate mapping information and the technicalities of the GPS details to the users. While these technicolor bursts of information may look impressive on the big screen, those actors have a script.
“We recognize the importance of giving our customers the ability to visualize and interpret the geospatial data without being geospatial data experts,” Heavenston said. With lots of products out there, few are user-friendly and most are “only digestible by the experts.”
Tough Stump took off their expert hats for a while as they built a lightning fast warhorse that was saddled with the simplicity the crew predicted would be needed.
The Promotion Tour: Bundle Up Those Answers
Artemis was the goddess of the hunt and was almost always found roaming the forests of Greece. For Tough Stump, ARTEMIS was the perfect name for the bundled pack of the three pucks in the net.
It is all there – drones, the laptop, the 3D work station, the trackers, the cameras and the payloads, the training – and answers all of the pressing questions Heavenston and his team knew they could answer.
“ARTEMIS stands for Aerial Reconnaissance Tactical Edge Mapping Imagery System and it does exactly that: it gathers, converts, communicates, tracks and explains,” Heavenston said.
It’s the first of its kind and Moore County’s Tough Stump leads the charge.
The Heros: The Drone and the Dog, ARTEMIS in Action
As part of this particular scene, the out-of-town prospects appear in their dusty Dodge Ram from behind the desolate hills. The truck is also decked out with an American flag.
The drone and the “dog” are waiting.
Artemis the drone looks like a stingray. With a black and white digital camouflage and large wings, she waits atop the green grasses like a stingray nestles down into the ocean’s bottom. She is aloof and beautiful.
Goose the dog is not. To be clear, he is not a dog. He is a UGV — unmanned ground vehicle — just like Artemis is an UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle. He doesn’t even look like a real dog; he looks more like an alien, but a middle-school alien: lanky, moving quickly, all over the place and just a little bit goofy. No offense to middle schoolers.
Heavenston doesn’t care; he loves the thing.
Goose uses LDAR (light, distance, and ranging) to gather information. But that’s for the sequel.
Goose isn’t even on the team — yet. He is part of the next wave of the ARTEMIS package. But it won’t be long.
Randy Roy, Tough Stump’s “Geospatial Cell Leader,” prepares the mock mission, explaining each step to his eager audience. He begins tapping on the uninspiring laptop he has plopped onto the bed of the truck. Within seconds, it comes alive and the voice inside thunders instructions. He moves the mouse on an ancient mousepad.
Artemis needs little guidance. With a few rocks back and forth, she is off. Like a baby bird finding her wings, the drone wobbles ever so slightly and the battle with the wind ensues. Quickly, she breaks through to the other side and is off flying almost instantly 400 feet above the ground. She has received her script and is on the scene.
Her official name is eBee TAC. She is fully NDAA-compliant, can be rapidly deployed from assembly to hand-launch in less than three minutes and operated by one person using one hand. Aside from photogrammetry, she can assess land damage, training damage, erosion, among a myriad of other very cool things.
Roy glances in the sky and back to the rapidly shapeshifting screen, “What this can create in less than an hour is just incredible. We are now so much more capable of understanding our environment. Imagine the degree to which wiser decisions can now be made based on this technology, this detail. We can measure a digital surface model terrain model down to a centimeter or two. At engineering quality.”
Artemis the Drone preparing for liftoff.
The location of the future Tough Stump headquarters is everything Heavenston had been looking for “and more.” The land sits along Vass-Carthage Road in between Vass and Carthage and just slightly out of the Whispering Pines area.
Tough Stump will take ownership of the property officially at the end of the month and Heavenston hopes within a year, the two offices in Southern Pines will both move to the property. In addition to that space, classroom space, indoor and outdoor space for testing, and plenty of room “to tinker” will be placed appropriately within the trees, and near the existing barn and farmhouse.
With a name like Tough Stump, Heavenston logically insists on keeping the environment as unspoiled as possible. He hopes that the additions will only improve and accentuate the natural location. He still finds it a little hard to believe he has gone “from sharing a small office with two other companies to 15 fulltime employees and 12 contractors.”
“With this new property, we will honor the unspoiled environment while improving what we can for the future. We are teaming with some farm-to-table operations to raise our own livestock and would love to be able to open doors to some new entrepreneurs like us.”
With the “seismic advances each year in technology,” Heavenston delights in being abreast of the changes in this industry. He believes that the next advance the industry is going to see is going to be in delivery.
Imagine being in a remote area and something breaks. “It doesn’t even need to be a colossal part. If you are in an extremely remote or rugged area, even though it may only be 15 miles away, it could take you two days to get there. If that part can’t get there, there’s an idle in the operation.”
He hinted that he had been working on solutions that will be complementary to the basic delivery drone. Adding automated logistics could allow machine to machine handoffs with no need for anyone to be close by.
Surely, Goose will win Best Actor.
As the credits begin to scroll in Heavenston’s head, he can’t quite decide how to word his appreciation for his team of “Stumpers” who “are equally a part of this journey. I lead a company full of talented people and each of them can and have solved countless problems that have needed resolution. I am happy and honored that this is what I do and who I do it with."
And that’s a wrap. A blockbuster is surely on the horizon.
The name “Tough Stump” comes “from a 100-year-old, seven-foot-high stump that is on my family’s land. The tree fell over and died way before the property was ours. Then it was struck by lightning and half petrified. I tried to chop it down and thought, ‘this is one tough stump.’”
Atos lives on through ATOS
Atos was Heavenston’s beloved dog that died in action attempting to do reconnaissance in Afghanistan. ATOS is named after him. He used the tragedy to prevent what had happened to Atos. The ATOS tags solved the problem.
“The nickname ‘Fish’ came from my gunner, SPC. Greg Nies. He thought I looked like Abe Vigoda from the sitcom Barney Miller. The character he played was named ‘Fish.’ It stuck.
Tough Stump decided the voice of the drone laptop that instructs and gives warnings should be named Jarvis and sound like JARVIS, who is the Marvel Comics fictional character made from artificial intelligence. The name supposedly stands for “Just a rather very intelligent system.”
Contact Sam Hudson at (678) 577-6183 or sam@thepilot.
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