dlhBowles is finding innovative solutions to a dirty problem

When the phone call came on a Friday night in late March, John Saxon and his team didn't waste any time before springing into action.

"It was bourbon down and laptops up," said Saxon, CEO at dlhBowles, an Ohio-based supplier of automotive air and fluid management systems. "The team went to work right away, and many didn't sleep all weekend."

The company had reached an agreement with General Motors to produce parts for essential medical equipment amid the coronavirus pandemic, and its engineering team forged plans to pivot its manufacturing capacity toward making parts for ventilators. Such a transition would normally take months, but dlhBowles condensed the time frame to a matter of days.

"We may be conditioning the industry to think we can move a whole lot faster," Saxon said.

The industry may already be well aware. When a federal rule mandating all new cars have backup cameras went into effect in 2018, demand for dlhBowles' camera-cleaning systems skyrocketed. Interest has only increased as automakers bring driver-assist systems that contain cameras and other sensors to the market.

That burgeoning business has allowed the company to address an underappreciated but essential part of fully self-driving vehicles — the need for sensors that help vehicles detect objects and perceive the road ahead to not be obscured by dirt, grime, ice and other contaminants.

In some respects, that brings the company's cleaning technology full circle. In the mid-2000s, a contractor asked dlhBowles to find a way to clean a long-range camera. The company was working on a design for a Department of Defense competition involving autonomous vehicles. The DARPA challenges, of course, are now considered seminal events for the nascent self-driving technology.

"It was a quick assignment with off-the-shelf parts," said Russell Hester, dlhBowles' director of business development. "They put it on the vehicle and said it did the job. But once we wrapped that up, we didn't think much more of it."

Now, the company is at the forefront of solving a key problem for both driver-assist and self-driving systems. Beyond cameras, it's working with lidar companies, including LeddarTech and Innoviz, to craft products for specific lidar units, and dlhBowles says it will have its Cler sensor cleaning products ready for use on a production vehicle in the 2021 model year.

"You have all these cool new systems like lane-keep assist and dynamic cruise control on cars, and you can't have them turning off because the sensors can't see clearly because of a little bit of mud or salt spray," Hester said. "Customers are expecting more from their products these days."