US University Innovation Award Winner
When Christian Claudel was a child in France, he enjoyed reading Franco-Belgian comics. In one, "Spirou et Fantasio: les heritiers (1953)", a popular series featuring the adventures of a young reporter and his friend, the main character invents a jetpack helicopter ("fantacoptere") that he uses to evacuate a child stuck on the second floor during a house fire.
“This was, of course, highly unrealistic at the time, but I realized the importance of rescue systems that could work in these scenarios,” recalls Christian.
Several decades passed but his realization of the importance – and need – of a new way to respond to emergencies remained top-of-mind. Indeed, it forms the core of his work and research as Dr. Christian Claudel, now an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin, where he also heads MASS, the Mobile Automation and Sensing Systems laboratory.
There, he accepts two students, fifth-year seniors Miguel Gonzalez and Alexander “Alex” Avila, as research assistants in that lab. They pursued the opportunity after attending a presentation that Gustavo Santaello, a newly graduated UT-Austin student, made to the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, on developing an emergency flying vehicle that could more effectively respond to wildfires than a traditional helicopter, glider, or drone by air and an ambulance by ground.
Miguel and Alex were “deeply inspired” by that presentation and with the assistance, encouragement and tutelage of Prof. Claudel, they established ASCEND, Aerial Solutions for Combatting Emergencies and Natural Disasters, with the goal of developing what Prof. Claudel envisioned those many years beforeas a child in France: “a third type of rescue system” that could work in such scenarios.
That third way has resulted in Team ASCEND’s entry into the global GoAERO challenge to develop a new generation of emergency response flyers. This achievement also led to ASCEND’s selection as one of 14 university-based teams to receive funds from GoAERO with support from NASA’s University Innovation project.
“We wanted to put our best foot forward,” says Miguel, chief engineer of the 25-student team, “by combining the novelty of the idea with the existing technology and the [GoAERO] mission of contributing to do good all over the world. So, to be honored for all the hard work we have put in is so rewarding.”
Alex, who serves as the team’s program manager, wholeheartedly agrees with this assessment, exclaiming that the GoAERO – NASA prize is “really awesome. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’re really happy to keep doing it now. This has instilled a ton of confidence in the team.”
It also instills a lot of confidence in Alex and Miguel on a very personal level. Both are the first in their families to go to college and the first in their families to pursue a career in an engineering field – “Although I won’t be the last because my younger brother is also studying engineering,” Alex relates.
Even Prof. Claudel is thrilled by the recognition, as well as by the GoAEROmission. He notes, “I am very excited by the fact that GoAERO will have a major impact in the way we organize emergency response. I hope to learn along the process, and to be able to experiment with radically new designs that would otherwise not have been explored.”
For Team ASCEND, that design will incorporate a STOL (short takeoff and landing) platform using a paramotor – a lightweight, portable aircraft that consists of a frame, harness, engine, and propeller, which is worn like a backpack and allows for powered paragliding. This platform is inexpensive to build, maintain and operate, and adaptable to multiple types of emergencies. Dr. Claudel explains that “this type of platform, if economically scalable, would greatly improve emergency response in post-disaster scenarios, when the objective is to resupply a particular area with sufficient food, water, medication and other equipment to rescue the stranded population.”
The next step in actualizing its platform is procuring some of the components the team needs to build its prototype flyer, including the special batteries needed for the throttle response mechanisms. Miguel and Alex say they will use the prize funds for this purpose.
Along the way, they acknowledge they will encounter challenges – “Now we havesome funding, we have access to a lot of resources, and we have a great team of very talented engineering students,” Alex notes. “Now, the challenge is how to maximize all these resources from an organizational standpoint.”
Adds Miguel, “We also have the challenges associated with physically assembling everything, how to integrate all the parts and the technologies into a cohesive prototype and then test it to ensure it best aligns with the realities of the competition.”
But the biggest challenge, according to Dr. Claudel, is control. He explains that “paramotor platforms are very economical, which explains why they are so popular as recreational flying platforms. However, they are also very difficult to control. We want to solve the problem of real-time control of these platforms, to make them fly in all weather conditions.”
He says the team intends to solve these control problems using a mix of innovative system design and the use of advanced algorithms for airflow estimation around the wing, which involve some degree of AI for visual perception.
That would seem to be the ideal job for Tony Stark, the fictional billionaire industrialist known more popularly as “Iron Man” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whom Alex cites as one of his inspirations. “I definitely wanted to be like him when I was growing up. Of course, all the designs and configurations he conjures up in his lab in the movie are not real, but the ideas are so cool.”
Miguel is more of a Tom Cruise-type of person than a Robert Downey Jr.-like one; the latter played “Iron Man” while the former is the star of Miguel’s favorite movie, “Top Gun” because of his love of the planes that Cruise pilots in the film.Moreover, he is a lifelong collector of die-cast airplanes and keeps his very first one, a Matchbox F16, on his desk.
Dr. Claudel matches Miguel’s passion for flying machines: “I’ve been passionate about aviation since my childhood. I was flying gliders when I was in high school. Because I am a poor pilot, I prefer to focus on the technical side. I was always interested in drones and have worked on many drone projects during my academic career.”
He says his biggest inspiration in all his aerospace endeavors is astronaut Jeff Hoffman (now with MIT). “He made fantastic video lectures about the space shuttle development. These lectures are extremely interesting with amazing guest lecturers. Though they focused on the specific problem of space shuttle development, they outline all the difficulties associated with developing a radically new system.”
Ironically, Dr. Claudel cites a World War II film "Memphis Belle" as his favorite. “It’s a great story about surviving a mission, teamwork, and duty.”
As ASCEND embarks on Stage 2 of GoAERO, those very same three attributes will certainly serve the team well.