In late 2019, after years of studying aviation and aerospace engineering,

Hector (Haofeng) Xu decided to learn to fly helicopters. At the time, he

was pursuing his PhD in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and
Astronautics, so he was familiar with the risks associated with flying
small aircraft. But something about being in the cockpit gave Xu a
greater appreciation of those risks. After a couple of nerve-wracking
experiences, he was inspired to make helicopter flight safer.

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In 2021, he founded the autonomous helicopter company Rotor

Technologies, Inc.

It turns out Xu’s near-misses weren’t all that unique. Although large,
commercial passenger planes are extremely safe, people die every year
in small, private aircraft in the U.S. Many of those fatalities occur during
helicopter flights for activities like crop dusting, fighting fires, and
medical evacuations.

Rotor is retrofitting existing helicopters with a suite of sensors and

software to remove the pilot from some of the most dangerous flights
and expand use cases for aviation more broadly.
“People don’t realize pilots are risking their lives every day in the U.S.,”
Xu explains. “Pilots fly into wires, get disoriented in inclement weather,
or otherwise lose control, and almost all of these accidents can be
prevented with automation. We’re starting by targeting the most
dangerous missions.”

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Rotor’s autonomous machines are able to fly faster and longer and carry
heavier payloads than battery powered drones, and by working with a
reliable helicopter model that has been around for decades, the company
has been able to commercialize quickly. Rotor’s autonomous aircraft are
already taking to the skies around its Nashua, New Hampshire,
headquarters for demo flights, and customers will be able to purchase
them later this year.

“A lot of other companies are trying to build new vehicles with lots of
new technologies around things like materials and power trains,” says
Ben Frank ’14, Rotor’s chief commercial officer. “They’re trying to do
everything. We’re really focused on autonomy. That’s what we
specialize in and what we think will bring the biggest step-change to
make vertical flight much safer and more accessible.”
Building a team at MIT
As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Xu participated in the
Cambridge-MIT Exchange Program (CME). His year at MIT apparently
went well — after graduating Cambridge, he spent the next eight years
at the Institute, first as a PhD student, then a postdoc, and finally as a
research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
(AeroAstro), a position he still holds today. During the CME program
and his postdoc, Xu was advised by Professor Steven Barrett, who is
now the head of AeroAstro. Xu says Barrett has played an important role
in guiding him throughout his career.

“Rotor’s technology didn’t spin out of MIT’s labs, but MIT really
shaped my vision for technology and the future of aviation,” Xu says.

Xu’s first hire was Rotor Chief Technology Officer Yiou He SM ’14,
PhD ’20, whom Xu worked with during his PhD. The decision was a
sign of things to come: The number of MIT affiliates at the 50-person
company is now in the double digits.

“The core tech team early on was a bunch of MIT PhDs, and they’re
some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with,” Xu says. “They’re
just really smart and during grad school they had built some really
fantastic things at MIT. That’s probably the most critical factor to our
success.”
To help get Rotor off the ground, Xu worked with the MIT Venture
Mentoring Service (VMS), MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), and
the National Science Foundation’s New England Innovation Corps
(I-Corps) program on campus.

A key early decision was to work with a well-known aircraft from the
Robinson Helicopter Company rather than building an aircraft from
scratch. Robinson already requires its helicopters to be overhauled after
about 2,000 hours of flight time, and that’s when Rotor jumps in.

The core of Rotor’s solution is what’s known as a “fly by wire” system

— a set of computers and motors that interact with the helicopter’s flight
control features. Rotor also equips the helicopters with a suite of
advanced communication tools and sensors, many of which were
adapted from the autonomous vehicle industry.

“We believe in a long-term future where there are no longer pilots in the
cockpit, so we’re building for this remote pilot paradigm,” Xu says. “It
means we have to build robust autonomous systems on board, but it also
means that we need to build communication systems between the
aircraft and the ground.”

Rotor is able to leverage Robinson’s existing supply chain, and potential

customers are comfortable with an aircraft they’ve worked with before
— even if no one is sitting in the pilot seat. Once Rotor’s helicopters are
in the air, the startup offers 24/7 monitoring of flights with a cloud-based
human supervision system the company calls Cloudpilot. The