Safe skies with self-flying helicopters

At the top of 2019, after years of studying aerospace engineering, Hector (Haofeng) Xu decided to learn to fly helicopters. At the time, he was pursuing his PhD in MIT’s Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, so he was acquainted with the risks related to flying small aircraft. But something about being within the cockpit gave Xu a greater understanding of those risks. After a number of nerve-wracking experiences, he got here up with the thought of ​​making helicopter flights safer.

In 2021, he founded the autonomous helicopter company Rotor Technologies, Inc.

It seems that Xu’s near misses weren’t all that unique. Although large business passenger aircraft are extremely protected, people die on small private planes within the United States yearly. Many of those deaths occur during helicopter flights for activities equivalent to crop pollination, firefighting and medical evacuation.

Rotor retrofits existing helicopters with a spread of sensors and software to alleviate the pilot of a number of the most dangerous flights and expand aviation use cases more broadly.

“People don’t realize that pilots within the U.S. risk their lives on daily basis,” Xu said. “Pilots fly into wires, develop into disoriented in bad weather, or otherwise lose control, and just about all of those accidents might be prevented through automation. We start by targeting probably the most dangerous missions.”

Rotor’s autonomous machines are able to flying faster, longer and carrying heavier payloads than battery-powered drones, and by partnering with a reliable helicopter model that has been around for a long time, the corporate was in a position to commercialize quickly. Rotor’s autonomous aircraft are already flying on demo flights around the corporate’s headquarters in Nashua, New Hampshire, and customers will give you the option to buy them later this yr.

“Quite a lot of other firms are attempting to construct latest vehicles with plenty of latest technologies around materials and powertrains,” says Ben Frank ’14, Rotor’s chief business officer. “They attempt to do every part. We’re really focused on autonomy. This is what we concentrate on and we imagine this will likely be the largest step forward in making vertical flight much safer and more accessible.”

Building a team at MIT

As a student on the University of Cambridge, Xu participated within the Cambridge-MIT Exchange Program (CME). His yr at MIT apparently went well – after graduating from Cambridge, he spent the subsequent eight years on the institute, first as a graduate student, then as a postdoctoral fellow, and at last as a research associate in MIT’s Department of Aerospace Engineering (AeroAstro), within the position that he still holds today. During the CME program and his postdoctoral period, Xu was advised by Professor Steven Barrett, who’s now the top of AeroAstro. Xu says Barrett has been instrumental to him throughout his profession.

“Rotor’s technology didn’t come from MIT’s labs, but MIT really shaped my vision for technology and the longer term of aviation,” says Xu.

Xu’s first job was Rotor Chief Technology Officer Yiou He SM ’14, PhD ’20, with whom Xu worked during his doctoral research. The decision was an indication for the longer term: the variety of MIT subsidiaries of the 50-person company is now within the double digits.

“Early on, the core technical team consisted of a gaggle of MIT graduate students, and so they are a few of one of the best engineers I even have ever worked with,” says Xu. “They are only very smart and have built some really amazing things while studying at MIT. That’s probably an important consider our success.”

To get Rotor off the bottom, Xu worked with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), and the National Science Foundation’s New England Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program on campus .

A key early decision was to work with a widely known Robinson Helicopter Company aircraft relatively than constructing an aircraft from scratch. After about 2,000 hours of flying, Robinson calls for an overhaul of his helicopters, after which Rotor steps in.

The core of Rotor’s solution is a so-called “fly-by-wire” system – a series of computers and motors that interact with the helicopter’s flight control functions. Rotor also equips the helicopters with a spread of advanced communications tools and sensors, lots of which have been adopted from the autonomous vehicle industry.

“We imagine in a long-term future where there aren’t any pilots within the cockpit, so we’re constructing on this distant pilot paradigm,” says Xu. “That means we’ve got to construct robust autonomous systems on board, however it also means we’ve got to construct communication systems between the aircraft and the bottom.”

Rotor is in a position to leverage Robinson’s existing supply chain, and potential customers feel comfortable with an aircraft they’ve worked with before – even when nobody is within the pilot’s seat. Once Rotor’s helicopters are within the air, the startup offers 24/7 monitoring of flights using a cloud-based human monitoring system the corporate calls Cloudpilot. The company begins flying to distant areas to avoid the chance of non-public injury.

“We take a really careful approach to automation, but in addition employ a highly trained human expert within the loop,” says Xu. “We get one of the best of the autonomous systems, that are very reliable, and one of the best of the people, who’re really great at making decisions and coping with unexpected scenarios.”

Autonomous helicopters take off

Using small aircraft to fight fires and transport cargo to offshore locations shouldn’t be only dangerous but in addition inefficient. There are restrictions on how long pilots can fly and so they usually are not allowed to fly in bad weather or at night.

Most autonomous options today are limited by small batteries and limited payload capacities. Rotor’s aircraft, called R550X, can carry a great deal of as much as 1,212 kilos, fly greater than 120 miles per hour and are equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks to remain aloft for hours.

Some potential customers are serious about using the aircraft to increase flight times and increase safety, while others need to use the machines for entirely latest applications.

“It’s a brand new aircraft that may do things that other aircraft couldn’t do – or possibly even in the event that they technically could, they would not do it with a pilot,” Xu says. “One could also imagine latest scientific missions that this is able to make possible. I hope to go away it as much as people’s imaginations to determine what they’ll do with this latest tool.”

Rotor plans to sell a small handful of aircraft this yr and increase production to 50 to 100 aircraft per yr from then on.

Meanwhile, Xu hopes that within the much long run, Rotor will play a job in getting it back into helicopters and eventually transporting people.

“Today, our impact has loads to do with safety, and we’re solving a number of the challenges which have plagued helicopter operators for a long time,” says Xu. “But I believe our biggest future impact will likely be changing our each day lives. I sit up for flying in safer, more autonomous and inexpensive vertical take-off and landing aircraft, and I hope Rotor will make a very important contribution to this.”