4.5.23-AI-Rotor

HECTOR XU: Hi, everyone. I'm Hector. I'm the CEO at Rotor and I'm going to talk to you about building the future of flight. So we have a lot of MIT DNA at Rotor. When we started, I brought a number of the team that built the world's first ion plane in Steven Barrett's lab, the Lab for Aviation in the Environment in Course 16.

We have a pretty high MIT representation. We're now 25 folks, working out of a big hangar in Nashua, New Hampshire, which is just a stone's throw over the New Hampshire border from here. So what are we doing at Rotor? We're changing how aircraft can be flown.

We're building a teleoperation system that allows a pilot to fly a helicopter or a light aircraft using satellite or cellular communications from thousands of miles away. We're building a novel pilot as a service business model. So rather than employing pilots, folks who own helicopters, helicopter operators can have remote piloting services delivered to them on a per hour pilot as a service model.

Our tech is designed to work with helicopters today as well as future electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. The fact that we're flying helicopters remotely entirely eliminates any risk to pilots and crew. We build flight control software that makes helicopters easier to fly and more stable, and that reduces the likelihood of human errors.

We use perception, that's camera and LiDAR systems, to enable safe flying at night and in low visibility conditions, which is currently not possible with light helicopters and aircraft. So if Kobe Bryant had had our system on his helicopter, he'd still be alive today. We also provide a higher useful payload, because you no longer have to carry the pilot or pilots and their associated equipment.

And by delivering piloting services on demand on a per hour basis, we can actually significantly lower the per hour piloting costs incurred by operators. So I don't know if I play the video. Yeah. So here you can see our system in action. So this is on a 2-meter rotor diameter helicopter, real pilot, flying in real time.

On the left is a first-person view camera, probably looks quite familiar. On the right is our proprietary synthetic vision system. You can see the pilots actually switching views while they fly. They're kind of doing a turn. This is at our New Hampshire test site just a couple of months ago.

And the right-hand synthetic vision system is like a video game that gives pilots better situational awareness, more mission capability than they would have even in a cockpit itself. And it helps us solve many of the performance issues around latency and bandwidth that traditionally come with long-range wireless communications. So we've built two full-scale flight prototypes that have been certified experimentally by the FAA.

We have an ongoing flight test program across New York and New Hampshire. And we've just raised $15 million to take this technology into production. We're about to launch our first commercial product, the Rotor 550X. It's a hardware plus software product where we have a remote pilot kit for the Robinson R44 helicopter.

So this is like the Toyota Camry of helicopters. There's a lot of them in operation. And we provide software that delivers remote pilot services on a per hour basis on a subscription model. This remotely piloted system can carry 550 kilograms for 350 nautical miles. This is about twice as much as the stock helicopter, the R44.

We'll have a production prototype flying later this year and entry into service in 2024. We're working with the US Forest Service and NASA to use our helicopters to fight wildfires. This initial firefighting market is where we're going to save lives both on the ground and in the air. And it will be an important proving ground for cargo and passenger applications more broadly.

So as we go to move towards production and entry into service, if you're a customer that's interested in using helicopters for tough, dangerous missions, we'd love to talk to you. We're looking for partners to help us deploy the system internationally. And if you want to, if you're an automotive and aerospace supply chain, and you'd like to build components for the future of aviation, we'd love to talk to you, too. Thank you.