Stage 1 Winner & US University Innovation Award Winner
When one is working to develop a new class of flying vehicles that can more effectively respond to emergencies caused by wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather catastrophic events or by urban traffic snarls that are inaccessible by helicopter, drone or ambulance, having a name that literally suggests mobility seems particularly fitting. That’s the case for Dr. Moble Benedict.
In fact, Moble is the name of the captain of Team Harmony, the joint entry of Texas A&M University and Oklahoma State University in the global GoAERO challenge. This alliance brings together complementary expertise from these two engineering programs – traditional rivals in athletics but united in their pursuit of developing innovative emergency response flyers. By combining their resources and technical knowledge, this cross-state team is leveraging their collective experience in aircraft design and testing to address critical challenges in disaster response and rescue operations.
Does having a name that is defined by “being able to move or be moved freely and easily” provide a competitive advantage to Team Harmony? Well, the eight-person team has been named one of 11 GoAERO’s Stage 1 winners, as well as one of 14 awardees receiving funds from GoAERO with support from NASA’s University Innovation Project.
“We are grateful for this recognition and the funding that comes with it,” says Dr. Benedict, associate professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M, who has authored more than 120 papers on aviation and aerospace-related subjects and holds 12 patents for work including vertical take-off and landing vehicles, and who previously led Team Harmony to Stage 1 and 2 wins in the GoFly competition, the global challenge to create personal flyers that preceded GoAERO. “The prizes will help us financially to build and flight test our subscale prototype to understand the dynamics and control of our novel aircraft concept, as well as de-risk the control strategy prior to the full-scale prototype flight tests. This knowledge will help us towards our GoAero Phase 2 submission.”
Dr. David Coleman, a post-doctoral researcher of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M who has more than a decade of experience in designing, developing, and flight testing both traditional and novel vertical flight aircraft, including serving as chief engineer on the GoFly team, adds that Harmony was looking for “opportunities to use some of the flyers we’ve already prototyped for real life, practical experiences. GoAERO is the perfect combination of opportunity and critically important mission.”
GoAERO’s humanitarian mission served as the impetus for Dr. Atanu Halder’s involvement in the initiative. “We’re always looking both to advance VTOL technology and to use these advances to serve and benefit society. Both aspects, the business and the service, motivates and excites us,” says the assistant professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State who has more than 10 years of experience in rotorcraft aeromechanics, unsteady aerodynamics, and nonlinear aeroelasticity, was the chief aerodynamic designer of the team’s GoFly vehicle, and was Dr. Benedict’s student at Texas A&M.
The combination of technology and mission is manifested in the design of the Team Harmony flyer, according to Amit Gadag, a PhD student at Texas A&M specializing in the design and development of autonomy-capable unmanned autonomous vehicles and whose research combines experimental analysis, including bench-top, wind tunnel, and flight testing, “to iteratively optimize eVTOL UAVs for peak performance.”
To achieve that peak performance, he says, “the team is building a novel, fully autonomous two-bladed rotor eVTOL aircraft capable of long-range, agile high-speed flight, as well as quick deployment for rapid response in emergency scenarios and crises faster than ever before.”
“Importantly, it will fit into the back of a commercially available trailer or truck, so all you would have to do is put it in the back of a truck, plug in the batteries, and fly,” Amit adds.
Dr. Benedict points out that extreme weather patterns and climate events have skyrocketed in the past half-century, while the U.S. response capabilities have remained largely stagnant, leaving millions vulnerable.
“So, major engineering breakthroughs are needed to disrupt the status quo in aerial emergency rescue and disaster relief efforts,” he stresses. “Without these innovations, the nation must continue to rely on helicopters for all search and rescue efforts. Although helicopters have been doing this for the past 80 years, success has been limited since many areas are unreachable, the rescues are very challenging, and helicopters have high acquisition and operating costs, not to mention a shortage of pilots. Furthermore, drone technology is too limited in size and scope to be utilized for rescue operations.”
It seems that Dr. Benedict has been thinking about developing such a breakthrough since he was a child growing up – and not just because of his very appropriate first name. His father was a mechanical engineering professor in India. “And I always wanted to be an inventor. I always was interested in how things worked – cars, ships, airplanes, rockets.”
His interest was piqued when he took his first ride in an airplane, a Cessna, in India. The first time he was ever aboard a commercial airplane was when he came to the U.S. to begin his Ph.D. studies at the University of Maryland. While studying for his Ph.D., he was exposed to helicopters and other VTOLs; he did his thesis on a Cyclo-copter, an aircraft first ideated about 100 years ago. Often characterized as an “aerial paddleboat,” it has two or four cycloidal rotors to provide lift, propulsion and control. There is also a propeller to keep the aircraft level.
Dr. Coleman may have grown up across the world from his colleague, in his case Plano, Texas, but he shared a “passion for flying things as a very young kid. I was always watching take-offs and landings from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. And many flightpaths went right over our house.”
Drs. Coleman and Benedict met while at Maryland, and when Dr. Benedict went to Texas A&M, “I followed him for my post-doctoral work,” relates the self-described “avid bird watcher.” He notes that this “work” involved a National Science Foundation-funded project to build a robotic hummingbird “to understand flight dynamics. Hummingbirds are so unique. No other birds fly this way. They can hover, fly upside down, and move in many directions just by adjusting the angle of their wings and tail, attributes similar to how a VTOL flies.”
Like Dr. Coleman, Amit – the son of teachers, his dad of finance, his mom of physics – grew up “fascinated by how things worked. I was always taking things apart just to see how they operated.”
But he didn’t engage in any real practical experiences in aviation or aerospace until he was selected to work in Dr. Benedict’s lab. He admits, though, that at the beginning, “I didn’t even know how to use an Allen wrench (Hex key)!”
Dr. Halder’s interests as a kid were totally dissimilar from those of his teammates. He acknowledges he knew nothing about aerospace engineering. “I wanted to be a soccer player, but I wasn’t good enough to be a professional. But I was good at numbers.” This aptitude for mathematics eventually led him toward engineering, where his computational skills could be applied to more complex aerodynamic challenges.
Nevertheless, as with all the Team Harmony members – who also include A&M Ph.D. students Reuben-Wayne Stewart and Vishnu Sai, and Ph.D. student Pedram Dabaghian and master’s degree student Ripon Sarker at OSU -- it was working in Dr. Benedict’s lab at Texas A&M that he first began immersing himself in the world of aviation and aerospace engineering. “That’s what really motivated me to learn to build and fly aircrafts,” he explains.
In fact, Team Harmony was formed by bringing together the five graduate students and the post-doc from Texas A&M and OSU. This strategic collaboration maximizes their collective experience in designing, building, and flight-testing VTOL UAVs. It also leverages their expertise in rotor design and the simulation of novel UAV configurations to enhance autonomy capabilities.
While they come from two different universities, which are longtime rivals in intercollegiate athletics, they are fully united in their passion for using their engineering skills and expertise to develop innovative aircraft solutions for many different applications pertaining to emergency response and rescue scenarios.
In other words, to fulfill the requirements of the GoAERO challenge!