Elroy Air’s Chaparrel VTOL aircraft wins Gold at international design competition

Elroy Air’s autonomous unmanned VTOL car­go air­craft, Chap­ar­rel, has won Gold in the Auto­mo­tive and Trans­porta­tion cat­e­go­ry at this year’s Indus­tri­al Design Excel­lence Awards (IDEA).

Chap­ar­rel was one of only 20 designs to receive a Gold award, from near­ly 2,00 entries sub­mit­ted. Pre­vi­ous entries include Apple’s orig­i­nal iPhone (Gold, 2008), Tesla’s Mod­el S (Gold, 2013) and the Ocu­lus Rift VR gam­ing head­set (Bronze, 2016).

Organ­ised by the Indus­tri­al Design­ers Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca (IDSA), the world­wide design com­pe­ti­tion cel­e­brates the very best in design excel­lence for design pro­fes­sion­als and stu­dents. A small group of new prod­ucts and sys­tems are recog­nised as the most inno­v­a­tive designs, with the most world-chang­ing poten­tial of the year. 

Com­ment­ing on the win on the pub­lish­ing plat­form Medi­um, Elroy said ‘this is a big deal’.

“We’re hon­oured! Look­ing back at pre­vi­ous Gold win­ners in this cat­e­go­ry you’ll find the BMW i3 and the Boe­ing 787 Dream­lin­er. As a start­up with a team of 20, we beat multi­na­tion­al aero­space and auto­mo­tive com­pa­nies to win this award.”

Elroy Air is build­ing an autonomous VTOL sys­tem that can deliv­er 300 lbs of car­go over a 300-mile range. It says its mis­sion is to improve the qual­i­ty of life around the world by expand­ing the reach of express logis­tics. Poten­tial sys­tem appli­ca­tions include com­mer­cial, human­i­tar­i­an aid and mil­i­tary.

In the blog, it adds that the Chap­ar­rel is one part cut­ting-edge fly­ing machine and anoth­er part mod­ern ware­house — pow­ered by a host of key enabling tech­nolo­gies that have recent­ly matured: Elec­tric Pow­er­train, Machine Per­cep­tion and Soft­ware, Dig­i­tal Design and Val­i­da­tion Tools.

“Today’s enabling tech­nolo­gies set the con­di­tions for inno­va­tion, but that isn’t the whole sto­ry,” it said.

“Also dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing the Chap­ar­ral is our obses­sion with devel­op­ing fea­tures and oper­a­tor inter­ac­tions to meet the cus­tomer need — from com­mer­cial logis­tics, to human­i­tar­i­an aid, dis­as­ter relief, and more. In start­up ver­nac­u­lar, this is called “cus­tomer devel­op­ment.” It’s the hard work of Prod­uct and Design, and in Aero­space this work must be in lock-step with Engi­neer­ing because in the end it needs to fly!

“We have been obsessed with get­ting the Chaparral’s capa­bil­i­ties and inter­ac­tions right since the ear­ly days of Elroy Air, and its func­tion­al­i­ty — espe­cial­ly the auto­mat­ed way it nav­i­gates on the ground to pick up and drop off car­go reflect hard-won lessons we learned by spend­ing time with our cus­tomers and a ton of pro­to­typ­ing and iter­at­ing. This work has result­ed in a host of inven­tions built into a vehi­cle that will cre­ate a huge leap for­ward in logis­tics.”

In Jan­u­ary 2020, Embraer’s dis­rup­tive busi­ness sub­sidiary, EmbraerX announced its expan­sion into the com­mer­cial air car­go mar­ket via a col­lab­o­rat­ing agree­ment with Elroy Air.

A press release detail­ing the news said the col­lab­o­ra­tion will allow both com­pa­nies to accel­er­ate the unmanned air car­go mar­ket world­wide, lever­ag­ing Embraer’s 50 years of indus­try expe­ri­ence with Elroy Air’s bold new devel­op­ments in autonomous air­craft sys­tems.