This hyperloop proved the theory, and created a startup
Engineering students show innovation is never wasted, writes Rick Spence.
Canadians are supposed to be good losers. But when a team of students from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Boston-based Northeastern University finished second in a recent engineering competition in Los Angeles, the team posted a tweet that claimed victory: “As the sun sets, we take home the 2nd place prize for speed. However, history has been made this day by proving the air-bearing concept.”
I’ll translate that tweet in a minute. For entrepreneurs, however, the significance of this tweet is that innovation is never wasted. Whether you win or lose with your latest iteration of a product, service or process, the key is that you’re pushing ahead and you’re measuring your success. Keep it up, and eventually you’ll outrun the competition.
You’ll also find that innovating creates new opportunities. In fact, two Memorial mechanical engineering students, Jeremy Andrews and Adam Keating, developed a new collaboration technology while sharing complex designs with their colleagues in Massachusetts — and now they’re turning it into a business. This month, their CoLab Software will demonstrate their first prototype as they seek beta-testers for their product prior to commercial release in early 2018.
Working on an international competition while finishing their final year of engineering “was an insane amount of work,” says Andrews, CoLab’s CEO. But once the competition ended, he and Keating drove to Silicon Valley to meet potential clients and investors. Says Andrews: “It will be nice just to focus on business.”
Now, back to that jargon-filled tweet. As most of Newfoundland and Labrador knows by now, Memorial students comprised half of the “Paradigm” team that competed last month in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition in Los Angeles. Hyperloop is the infamous “fifth mode” of transportation devised in 2013 by Tesla founder Elon Musk. Consisting of a capsule or pod that hauls people or freight through an enclosed tube with low air pressure, a hyperloop system is thought capable of reaching speeds of 1,200 km/h — faster than commercial jets.
The SpaceX competition began two years ago with 1,200 teams registering to develop hyperloop solutions. The competition concluded on Aug. 27 when three finalist teams ran their pods through a temporary, tubed track built on SpaceX’s parking lot. Paradigm’s entry was an 800-kg behemoth — a half-size model of a real hyperloop capsule — that hit 101 km/h. But Paradigm finished behind a German pod, from the Technical University of Munich, that hit 324 km/h.
The fact that the German entry weighed just 80 kg, and couldn’t carry Musk’s Labrador retriever, wasn’t held against it. Given the raw state of hyperloop technology, the competition rules were deliberately vague. First place was reserved for the fastest pod, of any weight or size, so the Germans won with a design of limited practical utility.
By contrast, the Paradigm team was more interested in proving the future of hyperloop technology. They even stuck to Musk’s original vision, using a passenger pod elevated on a thin cushion of air, like the puck used in air hockey. (Andrews developed the air-supply system himself, using compressed air from scuba tanks.) Most of Paradigm’s competitors used magnetic levitation, a more expensive technology that was demonstrated way back at Vancouver’s Expo 86, and is currently used in a few Asian public-transport systems.
“A big barrier to entry with air is that the track needs to be built to tighter tolerances” to reduce air pressure, says Andrews. “Can you build the tube to a tolerance that makes air-bearing feasible and cost-effective? We’ve proved it can be done.”
Now Andrews and Keating have another thing to prove: that their collaboration software can become a real business. After working in various engineering jobs during their off-site work terms, Andrews and Keating agreed they’d rather not work for hire again. “We wanted to do more creative things, and have free range,” says Andrews. “That’s not what you get with entry-level engineering jobs.”
It was during one of those work terms, when Andrews was spending his nights devising hyperloop components, that he first discovered the frustration of sharing mechanical designs with remote colleagues. Standard computeraided design products don’t let users easily integrate changes and new ideas from outside partners. Andrews built a common window that enabled different programs to access, integrate and edit changes, keeping everyone on the team updated and aligned. In a later work term, at Tesla, Andrews found that even corporate giants struggle to collaborate on mechanical designs, giving him and Keating the confidence to launch a company.
After incorporating CoLab in January, in May they brought on computer engineer Roy Brushett as a partner. While he develops the product, now called Gradient, Andrews looks after financing and sales, and Keating focuses on business development and government funding. With some funds from Newfoundland’s Research Development Corp., CoLab hopes to raise $100,000 in angel investment to get the company to revenue-earning status.
But back to that tweet. Was it braggadocio, or did Paradigm accomplish something special? I asked Brogan BamBrogan, a former SpaceX engineer who founded Los Angeles-based Arrivo, a hyperloop company operating in stealth mode prior to revealing its technology this fall. “Just being one of the three groups to get into the tube is a great achievement,” BamBrogan confirmed. “But the fact that they stayed levitated at 100 km an hour — that’s pretty cool.”
Just being one of the three groups to get into the tube is a great achievement. But the fact that they stayed levitated at 100 km an hour — that’s pretty cool.