Chatten Associates, Inc.

John Chatten is the founder of Chatten Associates, Inc. He first started working on human/robotic interfaces in the late 1950’s, while Research Manager of Information Science and Technology at Philco Corporation. His group built the very first operational head-aimed remote vision system. During his time at Philco, John’s primary focus was on the development of color television standards, systems and display technology, as well as pioneering development in image data coding and pattern recognition. He was a working member of several of the committees that wrote the original NTSC specification for color television.

After leaving Philco, John continued to work on human/robotic interfaces. In 1972, he founded Chatten Associates, Inc. The company was soon renamed Telefactor Corporation, to reflect its focus on human/robotic vision systems. Through several DoD and DARPA contracts, John developed the vision systems that produced the test results described in this web site.

In the 1970’s, Jim Bryan, a colleague of John’s from Philco, joined Telefactor as Chief Engineer following several years as head of instrumentation at NINDS (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) and NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health). Telefactor branched out into medical instruments, primarily neurophysiological instrumentation. This business line flourished, and Telefactor grew quite quickly.

In 1999, Telefactor’s medical instrument business was sold to Astro-Med Inc. Astro-Med formed the Grass-Telefactor Product Group with John Chatten as President and Jim Bryan as chief engineer for clinical products.

In 2003, Telefactor changed its name back to Chatten Associates, Inc., and returned to a focus on head-aimed remote vision systems (HARV). A HARV and small unmanned ground vehicle using current technology was developed to demonstrate the superiority the head-aimed vision concept. This led to projects with the Army Research Laboratory, John Deere Corporation, and ARDEC/Picatinny Arsenal. Chatten Associates Robotics Group is marketing its first HARV product in the first half of 2007.

In 2006, Chatten Associates re-acquired rights to several medical R&D projects from Astro-Med. John Chatten, Jim Bryan and others from the original Telefactor group re-joined Chatten Associates, creating the Medical Product Development Group.