Mission

New River Kinematics (NRK) is an engineering company focused on creating high quality software that provides comprehensive production solutions in a variety of industry settings (aerospace, shipbuilding, energy, and satellite).  We use our comprehensive toolkit of software components, custom software development skills, and engineering expertise to solve engineering problems quickly and efficiently. 

Click here to watch NRK's introduction video or click here for a brief list of NRK's projects of note.

History

NRK was founded in 1994 by two Ph.D. mechanical engineers who also specialize in computational kinematics. Since then, NRK has applied its flexible software tools to many engineering challenges including robotic simulation and control, coordinate metrology, engineering database management, and molecular modeling.  

Since entering the field, NRK has focused on two categories of work.  First, NRK continues to build and enhance SpatialAnalyzer® (SA), NRK’s core metrology software package.  Second, NRK undertakes many custom software projects that deal with metrology applications and typically focuses on custom integration with factory production processes.  Regardless of the project or application, the developers at NRK continually exceed customer expectations with fast, efficient software development, and engineering expertise. 

In addition to having a long association with numerous manufacturers of large scale parts and assemblies, NRK has extensive experience and a proven track record of success in architecting and implementing production level metrology-based solutions.  These include solutions involving complex geometries, optimization algorithms, and automated systems.  Many NRK team members are recognized worldwide as experts in the field of metrology. Click here for a list of NRK's projects of note.

Philosophy

Our goal here at NRK is to keep the software development process customer driven.  Often, customers do not truly know what they want until they see an initial embodiment of the general concepts of their particular application.  The antiquated process of complete product specification prior to development serves only to encumber the innovation possible with the object-oriented paradigm.  By developing solutions in small, iterative steps (or product life-cycles), we are able to craft our products to best meet and exceed customer expectations.  We find this life-cycle approach to be particularly well suited to modern, object-oriented software development.

All NRK code is developed using Visual C++ and the associated suite of tools.  Our code is fully object-oriented and makes extensive use of encapsulation, insulation, polymorphism and inheritance.  This architecture makes our products reliable, maintainable, and easily adapted to changing customer needs.  Given the large size of our code bases, we incorporate the large-scale software design concepts described by Lakos (1996).

Our method of writing code follows the “Industrial Strength Programming” paradigm described by Milewski (2001).  Central to this concept is the small, cohesive development team approach.  Instead of throwing an army of programmers at a software task, we precisely guide the development using a small team with extensive knowledge about all aspects of the code base.  In addition, our staff has an engineering background, enabling us to understand the actual engineering challenges in addition to the software implementation issues.

Lakos, J., 1996, Large Scale C++ Software Design, Addison-Wesley, New York.
Milewski, B., 2001, C++ In Action: Industrial Strength Programming Techniques, Addison-Wesley, New York.