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In late 2019, after years of finding out aviation and aerospace engineering, Hector (Haofeng) Xu determined to study to fly helicopters. At the time, he was pursuing his PhD in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, so he was conversant in the dangers related to flying small plane. But one thing about being within the cockpit gave Xu a higher appreciation of these dangers. After a few nerve-wracking experiences, he was impressed to make helicopter flight safer.
In 2021, he based the autonomous helicopter firm Rotor Technologies, Inc.
It seems Xu’s near-misses weren’t all that distinctive. Although massive, business passenger planes are extraordinarily secure, folks die yearly in small, non-public plane within the U.S. Many of these fatalities happen throughout helicopter flights for actions like crop dusting, preventing fires, and medical evacuations.
Rotor is retrofitting present helicopters with a collection of sensors and software program to take away the pilot from a few of the most harmful flights and increase use circumstances for aviation extra broadly.
“People don’t understand pilots are risking their lives on daily basis within the U.S.,” Xu defined. “Pilots fly into wires, get disoriented in inclement climate, or in any other case lose management, and nearly all of those accidents could be prevented with automation. We’re beginning by focusing on probably the most harmful missions.”
Rotor’s autonomous machines are capable of fly quicker and longer and carry heavier payloads than battery powered drones, and by working with a dependable helicopter mannequin that has been round for many years, the corporate has been capable of commercialize shortly. Rotor’s autonomous plane are already taking to the skies round its Nashua, New Hampshire, headquarters for demo flights, and clients will be capable of buy them later this 12 months.
“Numerous different firms are attempting to construct new automobiles with a lot of new applied sciences round issues like supplies and energy trains,” stated Ben Frank ’14, Rotor’s chief business officer. “They’re making an attempt to do all the things. We’re actually targeted on autonomy. That’s what we concentrate on and what we expect will convey the most important step-change to make vertical flight a lot safer and extra accessible.”
Building a crew at MIT
As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Xu participated within the Cambridge-MIT Exchange Program (CME). His 12 months at MIT apparently went nicely — after graduating Cambridge, he spent the subsequent eight years on the Institute, first as a PhD scholar, then a postdoc, and at last as a analysis affiliate in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), a place he nonetheless holds at the moment. During the CME program and his postdoc, Xu was suggested by Professor Steven Barrett, who’s now the top of AeroAstro. Xu stated Barrett has performed an vital position in guiding him all through his profession.
“Rotor’s expertise didn’t spin out of MIT’s labs, however MIT actually formed my imaginative and prescient for expertise and the way forward for aviation,” Xu stated.
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Xu’s first rent was Rotor Chief Technology Officer Yiou He SM ’14, PhD ’20, whom Xu labored with throughout his PhD. The resolution was an indication of issues to return: The variety of MIT associates on the 50-person firm is now within the double digits.
“The core tech crew early on was a bunch of MIT PhDs, they usually’re a few of the greatest engineers I’ve ever labored with,” Xu stated. “They’re simply actually good and through grad faculty they’d constructed some actually implausible issues at MIT. That’s in all probability probably the most crucial issue to our success.”
To assist get Rotor off the bottom, Xu labored 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 resolution was to work with a widely known plane from the Robinson Helicopter Company somewhat than constructing an plane from scratch. Robinson already requires its helicopters to be overhauled after about 2,000 hours of flight time, and that’s when Rotor jumps in.
The core of Rotor’s resolution is what’s often called a “fly by wire” system — a set of computer systems and motors that work together with the helicopter’s flight management options. Rotor additionally equips the helicopters with a collection of superior communication instruments and sensors, a lot of which have been tailored from the autonomous car business.
Rotor Technologies retrofits its autonomy stack onto present helicopters. | Credit: Rotor Technologies
“We imagine in a long-term future the place there are now not pilots within the cockpit, so we’re constructing for this distant pilot paradigm,” Xu stated. “It means we now have to construct strong autonomous techniques on board, but it surely additionally implies that we have to construct communication techniques between the plane and the bottom.”
Rotor is ready to leverage Robinson’s present provide chain, and potential clients are snug with an plane they’ve labored with earlier than — even when nobody is sitting within the pilot seat. Once Rotor’s helicopters are within the air, the startup affords 24/7 monitoring of flights with a cloud-based human supervision system the corporate calls Cloudpilot. The firm is beginning with flights in distant areas to keep away from threat of human harm.
“We have a really cautious strategy to automation, however we additionally retain a extremely expert human knowledgeable within the loop,” Xu stated. “We get the most effective of the autonomous techniques, that are very dependable, and the most effective of people, who’re actually nice at decision-making and coping with sudden eventualities.”
Autonomous helicopters take off
Using small plane to do issues like combat fires and ship cargo to offshore websites will not be solely harmful, it’s additionally inefficient. There are restrictions on how lengthy pilots can fly, they usually can’t fly throughout opposed climate or at night time.
Most autonomous choices at the moment are restricted by small batteries and restricted payload capacities. Rotor’s plane, named the R550X, can carry masses as much as 1,212 kilos, journey greater than 120 miles per hour, and be geared up with auxiliary gasoline tanks to remain within the air for hours at a time.
Some potential clients are all for utilizing the plane to increase flying instances and enhance security, however others need to use the machines for solely new sorts of functions.
“It is a brand new plane that may do issues that different plane couldn’t — or possibly even when technically they might, they wouldn’t do with a pilot,” Xu stated. “You might additionally consider new scientific missions enabled by this. I hope to depart it to folks’s creativeness to determine what they’ll do with this new software.”
Rotor plans to promote a small handful of plane this 12 months and scale manufacturing to provide 50 to 100 plane a 12 months from there.
Meanwhile, within the for much longer time period, Xu hopes Rotor will play a job in getting him again into helicopters and, ultimately, transporting people.
“Today, our influence has so much to do with security, and we’re fixing a few of the challenges which have stumped helicopter operators for many years,” Xu stated. “But I feel our greatest future influence will likely be altering our every day lives. I’m excited to be flying in safer, extra autonomous, and extra inexpensive vertical take-off and-landing plane, and I hope Rotor will likely be an vital a part of enabling that.”
Editor’s Note: This article was republished with permission from MIT News.
