In late 2019, after years of studying aviation and aerospace engineering, Hector (Haofeng) Xu decided to learn to fly helicopters. On the time, he was pursuing his PhD in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, so he was acquainted with the risks related to flying small aircraft. But something about being within the cockpit gave Xu a greater appreciation of those risks. After a few nerve-wracking experiences, he was inspired to make helicopter flight safer.
In 2021, he founded the autonomous helicopter company Rotor Technologies, Inc.
It seems Xu’s near-misses weren’t all that unique. Although large, business passenger planes are extremely protected, people die yearly in small, private aircraft within the U.S. Lots of those fatalities occur during helicopter flights for activities like crop dusting, fighting fires, and medical evacuations.
Rotor is retrofitting existing helicopters with a collection of sensors and software to remove the pilot from a number of the most dangerous flights and expand use cases for aviation more broadly.
“People don’t realize pilots are risking their lives on daily basis within the U.S.,” Xu explains. “Pilots fly into wires, get disoriented in inclement weather, or otherwise lose control, and just about all of those accidents will be prevented with automation. We’re starting by targeting probably the most dangerous missions.”
Rotor’s autonomous machines are capable of fly faster and longer and carry heavier payloads than battery powered drones, and by working with a reliable helicopter model that has been around for many years, the corporate has been capable of commercialize quickly. Rotor’s autonomous aircraft are already taking to the skies around its Nashua, Latest Hampshire, headquarters for demo flights, and customers will have the ability to buy them later this yr.
“Loads of other firms are attempting to construct recent vehicles with plenty of recent technologies around things like materials and power trains,” says Ben Frank ’14, Rotor’s chief business officer. “They’re attempting to do every little thing. We’re really focused on autonomy. That’s what we focus on and what we expect will bring the most important step-change to make vertical flight much safer and more accessible.”
Constructing a team at MIT
As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Xu participated within the Cambridge-MIT Exchange Program (CME). His yr at MIT apparently went well — after graduating Cambridge, he spent the subsequent eight years on the Institute, first as a PhD student, then a postdoc, and eventually as a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), a position he still holds today. Through the CME program and his postdoc, Xu was advised by Professor Steven Barrett, who’s now the pinnacle of AeroAstro. Xu says Barrett has played a crucial role in guiding him throughout his profession.
“Rotor’s technology didn’t spin out of MIT’s labs, but MIT really shaped my vision for technology and the longer term of aviation,” Xu says.
Xu’s first hire was Rotor Chief Technology Officer Yiou He SM ’14, PhD ’20, whom Xu worked with during his PhD. The choice was an indication of things to come back: The variety of MIT affiliates on the 50-person company is now within the double digits.
“The core tech team early on was a bunch of MIT PhDs, they usually’re a few of the very best engineers I’ve ever worked with,” Xu says. “They’re just really smart and through grad school they’d built some really incredible things at MIT. That’s probably probably the most critical factor to our success.”
To assist get Rotor off the bottom, Xu worked with the MIT Enterprise Mentoring Service (VMS), MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), and the National Science Foundation’s Latest England Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program on campus.
A key early decision was to work with a widely known aircraft from the Robinson Helicopter Company relatively than constructing an aircraft 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 solution is what’s often called a “fly by wire” system — a set of computers and motors that interact with the helicopter’s flight control features. Rotor also equips the helicopters with a collection of advanced communication tools and sensors, lots of which were adapted from the autonomous vehicle industry.
“We consider in a long-term future where there aren’t any longer pilots within the cockpit, so we’re constructing for this distant pilot paradigm,” Xu says. “It means we have now to construct robust autonomous systems on board, nevertheless it also implies that we’d like to construct communication systems between the aircraft and the bottom.”
Rotor is capable of leverage Robinson’s existing supply chain, and potential customers are comfortable with an aircraft they’ve worked with before — even when nobody is sitting within the pilot seat. Once Rotor’s helicopters are within the air, the startup offers 24/7 monitoring of flights with a cloud-based human supervision system the corporate calls Cloudpilot. The corporate is starting with flights in distant areas to avoid risk of human injury.
“Now we have a really careful approach to automation, but we also retain a highly expert human expert within the loop,” Xu says. “We get the very best of the autonomous systems, that are very reliable, and the very best of humans, who’re really great at decision-making and coping with unexpected scenarios.”
Autonomous helicopters take off
Using small aircraft to do things like fight fires and deliver cargo to offshore sites will not be only dangerous, it’s also inefficient. There are restrictions on how long pilots can fly, they usually can’t fly during opposed weather or at night.
Most autonomous options today are limited by small batteries and limited payload capacities. Rotor’s aircraft, named the R550X, can carry loads as much as 1,212 kilos, travel greater than 120 miles per hour, and be equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks to remain within the air for hours at a time.
Some potential customers are excited by using the aircraft to increase flying times and increase safety, but others need to use the machines for entirely recent sorts of applications.
“It’s a brand new aircraft that may do things that other aircraft couldn’t — or perhaps even when technically they might, they wouldn’t do with a pilot,” Xu says. “You possibly can also think of latest scientific missions enabled by this. I hope to go away it to people’s imagination to work out what they’ll do with this recent tool.”
Rotor plans to sell a small handful of aircraft this yr and scale production to provide 50 to 100 aircraft a yr from there.
Meanwhile, within the much long term, Xu hopes Rotor will play a job in getting him back into helicopters and, eventually, transporting humans.
“Today, our impact has so much to do with safety, and we’re fixing a number of the challenges which have stumped helicopter operators for many years,” Xu says. “But I believe our biggest future impact can be changing our day by day lives. I’m excited to be flying in safer, more autonomous, and more cost-effective vertical take-off and-landing aircraft, and I hope Rotor can be a crucial a part of enabling that.”