Areté

Areté was founded in 1976 by five scientists who had been tasked by the US Department of Defense with detecting weak signals in strong ocean noise. The company is headquartered in Northridge, California, and has further offices in Falls Church (Virginia), Huntsville (Alabama), Niwot (Colorado), Tucson (Arizona), Niceville (Florida) and Healdsburg (California). Its work covers lasers and LiDAR, counter-UAS, force protection, maritime surveillance and space systems, and it describes its undersea specialisation as the non-acoustic detection of objects under water.

A central programme is the AN/AES-1 Airborne Laser Mine Detection System (ALMDS), which uses streak tube imaging LiDAR (STIL) to detect, classify and localise surface and near-surface moored sea mines. The pod is integrated with the US Navy’s MH-60S helicopter and deployed from the Littoral Combat Ship as part of the mine countermeasures mission package; Northrop Grumman produces the pod, while Areté supplies the receiver sensor assembly. Areté is also the commercial transition partner and integrator of the Advanced Sensor Package for the Mk 18 unmanned underwater vehicle.

Derived from this work, the Pushbroom Imaging LiDAR for Littoral Surveillance (PILLS) is a compact airborne bathymetric LiDAR developed with ONR and NAVAIR funding and sized for tactical UAS. It has been flight-tested on the Schiebel CAMCOPTER S-100, which flew the PILLS Next Generation sensor at the NATO exercise REPMUS 2025 in Portugal with launch and recovery from a Portuguese offshore patrol vessel. Further products include the passive electro-optical counter-UAS detection and tracking system Basilisk, the image-based monitoring software AIMS for UAS and ground platforms, and the STRIDR ocean drifter used by the US Navy, US Coast Guard, DARPA and NOAA.