Do you ever sit down with a friend who wants to show you all their latest vacation pictures? (Maybe not as much since photo-sharing sites took off.) Well, yesterday’s kickoff of the Distinguished Lecturer Series at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering was just like that—if your friend were Charles Simonyi, a software billionaire, showing you videos from a $35 million vacation in space.

Simonyi, the father of Microsoft Word and Excel, and now head of Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software, regaled the crowd of a couple hundred students, faculty, and guests with stories and videos from his second trip to space last March. Simonyi rode a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS), docked and spent some time there, and returned safely to Earth, looking none the worse for wear. He is an outspoken proponent of space tourism, and he pointed out that Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, is currently making his way aboard the space station as “the first clown in space” (and the seventh space tourist ever).

Just a few interesting tidbits that stood out to me:

—Seattle and Mercer Island look very pretty from space. “You can’t see the Great Wall or the Pyramids, but you can see Sea-Tac,” Simonyi said. You can also see clouds, lightning storms, and jet contrails, the latter especially over North America. Watching the sunrise from orbit is spectacular.

—The instruments on the spacecraft look refreshingly antique. You think they’d be slick and modern-looking, but the inside of the Soyuz and space station look like they’re out of a 1970s sci-fi movie. In fact, some instruments date back to 19th century designs (”tried and true”), and software on the rocket runs on an Intel 386 processor from the ’80s. “Older chips are more resistant to radiation,” Simonyi explained.

—Bodily functions are funny in space. You wear a lightly applied tourniquet to keep blood flowing in your legs; you get a puffy face from lack of circulation; the toilet is an engineering marvel …Next Page »

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Hillsboro, OR-based TriQuint Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TQNT) announced today it has acquired TriAccess Technologies, based in Santa Rosa, CA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TriAccess makes integrated-circuit amplifiers for audio, video, and HDTV applications. TriQuint Semiconductor, founded in 1985, makes wireless communication technologies for mobile manufacturers, cellular base stations, and defense and aerospace contractors.

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The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International says its conference and exhibition in Washington D.C. this week is the largest event of its kind, featuring the world’s biggest collection of robotic vehicles for use in the air, land, and sea. Judging by the news conference agenda, however, the four-day convention could almost be called the Northrop Grumman Robot Show.

The Southern California defense contractor, which operates a major unmanned systems business in San Diego, accounts for eight of the 15 news conferences the Virginia-based industry association has scheduled for today and tomorrow.

Gene Fraser

The scope of Northrop Grumman’s work in robotic vehicles seems to have grown so big that E.J. “Gene” Fraser, a vice president in the company’s strike and surveillance systems division, is giving an overview of the company’s unmanned systems—in the air, on the ground, and at sea. The company’s major programs include:

—The high-altitude Global Hawk UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle, operated above Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. Air Force.

—The Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program, a $1.2 billion development effort that seeks to adapt Global Hawk technologies for specialized use by the U.S. Navy in monitoring vast tracts of ocean.

—The Fire Scout, an unmanned helicopter under development for the Navy. Northrop Grumman says the Fire Scout completed a series of flight tests aboard the USS McInerney last month as the warship cruised off the coast of Mayport, FL.

—The X-47B unmanned combat air system, a Navy strike aircraft capable of carrier landings and takeoffs. Northrop Grumman is completing final assembly of its first X-47B prototype, with a first flight tentatively set for November.

As unmanned, robotic vehicles become increasingly commonplace, Fraser tells me the pre-conference buzz is focused not so much on breakthrough …Next Page »

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The world’s largest collection of unmanned aircraft and other robotic systems is coming in for a landing this week in Washington, D.C., at a four-day conference that’s sponsored by AUVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Today’s the big day for video capture, with live demonstrations of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles) taking place at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in St. Inigoes, MD. The rest of the conference returns tomorrow to the Washington Convention Center.

As it turns out, a lot of expertise in robotics and unmanned systems is concentrated in San Diego, Boston, and Seattle. Companies based in all three Xconomy cities have scheduled presentations and press conferences, although I could find just one, Insitu, from the greater Seattle area. Here’s my rundown:

—Aurora Flight Sciences (Manassas, VA). The government contractor has scheduled a press conference Wednesday afternoon that could be related to its Excaliber UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) or SunLight Eagle, a large, solar-powered UAV. Aurora, which maintains close ties with MIT and operates a major R&D lab in Cambridge, MA, successfully completed a first flight of the Excaliber last month, and describes the vertical takeoff and landing UAV as the first in a new class of unmanned combat systems. The company said in May it had completed a series of SunLight Eagle flights.

—Hydroid (Pocasset, MA). Hydroid, which was acquired by Norway’s Kongsberg family of companies in December 2007, has set a press conference Tuesday morning to discuss the capabilities of its line of torpedo-like autonomous underwater vehicles.

—Maxon Motor (Fall River, MA). Roger Hess of Swiss-owned Maxon is giving an oral presentation on “A Robot To Help The Environment” as part of a conference track on unmanned ground vehicles. Maxon makes precision electric motors and high-precision drive systems.

—Protonex (Southborough, MA). Paul Osenar and colleagues from fuel cell systems developer Protonex are giving a presentation on their development of fuel cells for long-duration electric UAVs and UGVs.

—Insitu (Bingen, WA). The Boeing subsidiary has scheduled a news conference Tuesday morning to discuss the Integrator, its next-generation UAV, and latest technological advances within its family of unmanned systems.

—Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems and Information Systems divisions (San Diego). The Southern California defense contractor has arranged a number of media updates Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning—as well as conference presentations—to describe work that encompasses its high-altitude Global Hawk UAV, the unmanned Fire Scout helicopter, its Remotec Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for bomb disposal and other work, and its $1.2 billion Broad Area Maritime Surveillance UAV program intended to provide oceanic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for the Navy.

—SAIC (San Diego). The big defense contractor also known as Science Applications International Corp., the U.S. Coast Guard, and University of Alaska will discuss the use of unmanned aircraft systems in oceanic airspace over international waters.

—General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (San Diego). GA Aeronautical plans to give a presentation Thursday morning on the multi-mission capabilities of its Predator B UAV.

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Xconomy has learned that MicroGreen Polymers, an Arlington, WA-based developer of technology to recycle plastics into cheaper, environmentally friendly coffee cups among other things, has raised $1.6 million for expansion from WRF Capital and local angel investors (Northwest Energy Angels, Alliance of Angels, and Atlas Accelerator), out of an ongoing round the company expects will net $3 to $4 million later this month.

The money will be used to build up MicroGreen’s commercial manufacturing capacity, and boost its payroll from 9 people to as many as 30 over the next year, says CEO Tom Malone. The company is also scouting new locations, likely to be in Everett, WA, he says.

MicroGreen got started in 2002, when it spun out of the University of Washington. The basic idea from founders Greg Branch and Krishna Nadella, a pair of graduate students, was to see if they could develop a technique to squeeze high-pressure liquid carbon dioxide into plastics, to heat them up and expand them while in a solid state. This process creates billions of tiny microbubbles that allow manufacturers to maintain most of the properties of regular plastic, while using a lot less of the regular plastic that is made from oil. The MicroGreen technique also creates a handy insulating layer of air inside the plastic, which can protect your hand from getting burned while holding that hot morning coffee. But plastics are everywhere in the modern world, and MicroGreen Polymers sees plenty of opportunities to stick its recycled product into markets that are worth billions.

“We can use less plastic to do the same work,” Malone says. “It’s a less-is-more story.”

The technology, which MicroGreen calls “Ad-air” does just that—it adds air bubbles into recycled PET plastics (like the stuff from water and soda bottles), which makes the subsequent product lighter, uses less material, and makes it cheaper, Malone says. It retains many, but not all of the same properties as the original plastic, so it can’t be used for everything, he says.

The initial applications of the MicroGreen technology have been for a reflector plate that a Japanese manufacturer used to make liquid crystal display TVs appear brighter, and for a contract with Northrup Grumman to help make some electronics equipment lighter, Malone says. These aren’t huge clients, generating revenue of about $1 million last year, and almost $2 million this year, Malone says.

Bigger opportunities lie ahead in disposable coffee cups, food packaging such as …Next Page »

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Bingen, WA-based Insitu, a developer of unmanned aircraft systems, announced today it has received a one-year, $30 million contract from the Canadian government to provide technologies to support Canadian forces’ operations in Afghanistan. The contract, which includes two additional one-year options, specifically calls for small unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Insitu was acquired by Boeing (NYSE: BA) for about $400 million last summer.

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After Terrafugia’s heavily attended press conference this morning announcing the maiden flight of the company’s drivable aircraft, the Transition, I buttonholed founder and CEO Carl Dietrich for a one-on-one interview. He said the flight, which took place on March 5, is probably “the biggest single milestone” that Terrafugia could have achieved—and that the company is now in a strong position to raise more money as it continues with testing and development of its “flying car” and eventually moves toward manufacturing.

If venture or private-equity investors don’t come through, Dietrich says the company has good leads on “a couple” of possible corporate investors. Interestingly, Dietrich says it’s not clear yet whether the Transition will actually be manufactured in Massachusetts. The company has “proposals from all around the country” for siting its manufacturing facilities—but for now, the company’s modest garage in Woburn, MA, will do, he says.

Here’s the full interview:

Xconomy: Having reached this goal, how do you feel now about the prospects for real long-term success? Do you feel like you’ve cleared a big barrier, gotten over a hump?

Carl Dietrich: It’s definitely a big barrier. It’s the first question everyone asks—”Has it flown yet?” And it brings a new level of credibility to the company to say, “Yes, it has flown.” We have proven that we can build a vehicle in this configuration. This is a completely new configuration, that flies, that drives. So from that perspective, it is probably the biggest single milestone in the overall development of the company. There are lots of little milestones. But the first flight of the first vehicle—that is a big one. That is kind of the biggest one.

X: So, following on that, do you feel like this puts you in a better position for going back out and raising more investment when the time comes? I’m assuming you need to ramp up the scale of everything to start manufacturing”?

CD: Absolutely. We do feel it puts us in a better position. That was actually part of our plan, to wait until the first flight and then go back out and hit the dirt and see what’s coming, see what we can come up with. That is part of the plan for the coming months, to start moving that process forward and see if we can get interest on the institutional investment side. And if we can’t, we’ve actually got a couple of good corporate leads. Who knows where those could go.

X: Do you think that you’ll actually build the production vehicles here in Massachusetts, or haven’t you decided that yet?

CD: It really hasn’t been determined at this point. Obviously I have selfish reasons for not wanting to move. But the bottom line is still the bottom line. We’ve gotten proposals from all around the country, and actually overseas, to do manufacturing. And we don’t know yet what we’re going to do. There are a lot of different things to weigh in the decision. At this time it doesn’t benefit us to make that decision. We are going to be in development for another couple of years before we really need a lot more room. Or at least, more than a year of additional time before we need a lot more space. And there is no advantage to us committing to someplace right now until we actually are close. In the meantime we will hopefully just continue to build the company’s credibility, so that people can say, “Hey, if they keep going they really are going to create hundreds of jobs,” and what’s that worth? So that’s what we’re looking to do right now.

X: Do you anticipate having a series of more public events, public flights, with journalists present, eventually?

CD: Eventually. When that will be, I can’t make any commitments at this point. We are testing this vehicle at Plattsburgh International Airport, which is actually a TSA-controlled field. So we actually had to go get badged, which was a multi-week process. We had to go through a training program, in order to get out onto the grounds, and then our camera crew, which couldn’t go through that training, the documentary crew that is following us, they actually had to get escorted out onto the field, and somebody has to sit there and wait with them, as they are out there filming the vehicle.

X: So somebody is making a documentary? Is it WGBH or somebody?

CD: No, it’s actually an independent film crew. A couple of our investors are producers, so they’ve actually been following us from the beginning. They are going to have a nice product that they’ll be able to leverage. It’s a win-win.

X: Why did you pick Plattsburgh—I mean, why that airport?

CD: A couple of reasons. The biggest one is that it’s an old B-52 bomber base. Phil [Meteer, the test pilot for the first flight] talked about how for this Phase 1 of testing, where you just want to take off and touch down, you want …Next Page »

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[Update, 2:30 p.m., March 18, 2009: We've just published an extensive followup interview with Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia's founder and CEO.]

Ever since my first visit to Terrafugia’s Woburn, MA, warehouse last May to see the startup’s Transition “roadable aircraft,” I’ve been pestering CEO Carl Dietrich to clue us in about the craft’s first flight. He was always a bit cagey, saying that the maiden flight wouldn’t be announced in advance and that the press wouldn’t be invited, for safety and security reasons. (That’s understandable, I guess—I wouldn’t want me around either, if something went wrong.)

Well, true to Dietrich’s word, Terrafugia conducted its first flight in secrecy, at 7:40 a.m. on March 5. But it’s only revealing that fact to the world today, in a dramatic press conference taking place at this hour at the Boston Museum of Science, where a prototype of the Transition is on temporary exhibit. [I'm adding details from the press conference below, as well as videos of the first flight on the second page of this story.]

The first Transition flight lasted only 37 seconds and covered about 3,000 feet. It took place directly over the runway at Plattsburgh International Airport in Plattsburgh, NY, a location selected because of its extremely long runway and low traffic. The flight was piloted by Phil Meteer, a retired Air Force colonel.

“With this achievement, Terrafugia has set the stage for personal aviation,” Dietrich said at the press conference.

Travel has now become “a hassle-free integrated air-land experience,” Dietrich added in a statement distributed at the conference. “It’s what aviation enthusiasts have been striving for since 1918″—the date of the first experiments with roadable aircraft.

Meteer was also the pilot for six subsequent test flights, including a more extensive spin around the Plattsburgh airport. “It was apparent to me from the moment of takeoff that I had control of a very stable aircraft,” Meteer said at the press conference. “I had a test plan…and after a minute I realized my daughter could do this, it was fun, anyone could do it.”

Angel-funded Terrafugia has been working on the Transition since 2006, when Dietrich, a 31-year-old with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, won the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for various cool inventions, including a pumpless rocket engine. He put the money into the company, which became a $10,000 runner-up in the 2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. From their Woburn facility, a nondescript former garage door factory, Dietrich’s team has been hard at work on the two-seat, four-wheeled, carbon-fiber-composite aircraft, which can fly up to 450 miles at 115 miles per hour and is distinguished by folding wings that ratchet out of the way when it’s on the ground. That makes the craft just 80 inches wide, narrow enough to tool down the highway—where it can go up to 65 mph and get 30 miles to the gallon.

The Transition isn’t designed to be anyone’s primary ground vehicle. (For the estimated $194,000 sticker price, early adopters would be better off buying a Tesla Roadster—they’d still have $85,000 left over.) Rather, Terrafugia is spinning the vehicle as a convenient option for pilots who want to be able to fly to any airport—say, Martha’s Vineyard—and then be able to drive to their final destination without having to rent a car separately.

It’s not clear how many potential customers fit that profile. But one key to Terrafugia’s business plan is that in 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration created a new class of pilot’s licenses, for planes that weigh under 1,320 pounds and fly slower than 138 miles per hour—so-called special light-sport aircraft. Getting a sport pilot certificate to fly one of these planes takes half as much training as qualifying for a traditional private pilot license, which could greatly expand the potential market for planes like the Transition.

Already more than 40 people have put down deposits of $10,000 each to hold their place in line for a Transition. Dietrich said at today’s conference that the first production craft will be ready for customers in 2011 (a year later than previously projected).

Terrafugia is a neologism from the latin words for “land” and “escape.”

Live blogging from the press conference:

Phil Meteer: “All seven landings were very smooth touchdowns. The cockpit has outstanding visibility of the runway environment.”

“Something made me want to take off again, so Carl had to chase after me in the chase truck.”

“Ninety percent of the total program risk is in the first flight and we’re past that, so Terrafugia has taken off in more ways than one.”

Q&A:

What’s next for Transition? Dietrich: Delivery of first vehicle will be in 2011. The manufacturing process is expected to create hundreds of jobs. “With this accomplishment Terrafugia is poised to usher in a new era of general aviation.”

Meteer: Vehicle has been through two rounds of wind tunnel testing but we have to validate it. “It will graduate when we’re convinced it’s performing as designed and ready for the next stage.”

Dietrich: “We have already begun design work on the next prototype.”

Meteer: “This design is very safe. Bring it back to the first airplane flight….there is risk. If you talk about fear — I think a bigger danger is that we wouldn’t do something like this out of fear. To me that is more dangerous than getting in there. Risks are things we can manage. We can label them, analyze risk, say ‘No unnecessary risk.’ We can show courage in the face of danger and engage in no recklessness. That’s why it took us 6 months of powered testing to get off the runway.”

Does it have a ballistic recovery system — a rocket deployed parachute? Dietrich: It does. “If you get into trouble you can pull a handle and the entire vehicle will be brought down safely.”

How much will it cost? Dietrich: “The anticipated purchase price is $194,000. We are accepting deposits. The aircraft can be reserved. There have been over 40 aircraft sold already.”

How many does the company have to sell to break even? “That’s proprietary.”

Who are the buyers? Dietrich: “Many are couples, many live in retirement communities and they see this as a recreational vehicle that allows them to visit their families.” Some business users. A mix of customers. International as well.

Does the propeller disengage on the ground? Dietrich: “Yes, it switches to wheel drive exclusively.”

What were the biggest challenges in developing this vehicle? Dietrich: “There are a lot of regulations that govern air traffic and a lot of regulations that govern pilots. We have a small team with limited resources and making sure that we abide by all those regulations was a significant challenges.”

Describe your feelings the first time you took it into the air? Meteer: “You realize that being in the at 100 mph is better than being on the runway. It was remarkably unremarkable. It was almost humorous. It flies like an airplane. There is another part of that — as a tester you learn to put your feelings aside. The feelings don’t really come out until after.”

Continue to page 2 for videos of the Transition’s first flight.

…Next Page »

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We’re looking forward to seeing you today at Xconomy’s San Diego premiere, an entertaining and eye-opening presentation on Physics for Future Presidents by UC Berkeley’s Richard A. Muller. Online registration for the event, which is here, closes at noon and walk-in registrations begin at 3:30 pm The presentation begins at 4 pm—hope to see you there!

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If President Obama ever has a question about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, he can just pick up his Presidential Blackberry and call or e-mail Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Of course, the President of the United States could just as easily call Richard A. Muller—the U.C. Berkeley professor who literally wrote the book on Physics for Future Presidents. He also was a leading member of the Berkeley team that theorized how an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Now Xconomy has tapped Muller and his talent for eye-opening explanations as the featured speaker at our San Diego premiere event. We are hosting the MacArthur “genius” award-winning physicist as the inaugural speaker for our Xconomy Forums here, to be held Monday at 4 p.m. at UCSD’s Institute of the Americas Complex. If you’re interested in attending, you can register here.

The book Physics for Future Presidents grew out of Muller’s popular class for non-science majors at Cal—which was voted “The Best Class at Berkeley” last year in a readers’ poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Californian. Muller’s book and lectures have gained renown for explaining the important science underlying terrorism, energy, electric cars, nukes, space, and global warming—and for empowering our electorate with a better understanding of science and technology.

Please join us Monday afternoon to hear this engaging presentation by one of the foremost speakers on science and technology. I hope to see you there.

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The United States Navy announced today that it has awarded a $146 million contract to Cambridge, MA-based Charles Stark Draper Laboratory for work on guidance systems to extend the life of the Trident II, a submarine-launched nuclear missile developed by Lockheed Martin in the 1980s. About 12 percent of the work will occur at Draper’s Cambridge facility, 10 percent in Pittsfield, MA, and the remainder in Florida and Minnesota. The Navy said it didn’t solicit competing bids for the contract.

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Boeing is cutting about 10,000 jobs this year, or 6 percent of its workforce, according to chief executive James McNerney. The news was announced in a conference call this morning. Boeing cited decreased revenues and the global economy as reasons for the cutbacks, which will occur through a combination of layoffs, retirements, and attrition. More than half of the losses will be in Washington state, according to the Seattle Times.

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When people try to get a sense of the vibrancy in a regional high-tech cluster, they usually look up reams of data on technology licenses, patents, jobs, and number of startups. This morning, I got to look at a fresh (and important) perspective that traces out where the founding people cut their teeth and got inspired to start a company, and shows what they went on to create.

The end result of this project, commissioned by the Washington Technology Industry Association, is a poster you can look at here called the “Puget Sound Tech Universe.” It depicts 711 companies and institutions in the region, based on a yearlong research project conducted by Heike Mayer, a professor at Virginia Tech University. This morning, she discussed the findings at a breakfast meeting of the WTIA, along with a quartet of regional tech leaders: Tom Alberg of Madrona Venture Group, Bill McAleer of Voyager Capital, Jeremy Jaech of Verdiem, and Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.

One of the key findings is that Seattle’s technology cluster has been built over the past three decades by six key organizations. They are Microsoft, the University of Washington, Boeing, Amazon.com, McCaw Cellular Communications, and Aldus. They are represented visually on the map as “suns,” with a solar system of “planets” that revolve around them, namely companies that were founded by people who got experience at a bigger “sun” company before trying their hand at something new. The map is also chock-full of “comets,” or startups, that fall outside the orbit of the six big players, as well as signs for key connection-maven organizations, like WTIA or venture capital firms.

“I was amazed at the sheer number of companies that spun out of these big six companies,” says Ken Myer, president and CEO of the WTIA. “A handful of institutions have really made an enormous impact on the growth of our region.”

Gathering all of this data was no small task, because nothing quite like it had been done before, according to Mayer, the Virginia Tech professor. Mayer and her collaborators conducted an online survey to add some explanations to how these companies got going, and they received more than 280 replies she says. The project also relied on source data from the Puget Sound Business Journal’s Book of Lists, Seattle Startup 2.0 list, and Xconomy’s own gaming cluster analysis that we published in September.

Mayer conducted her dissertation with a similar visual analysis of the universe of tech companies in the Portland, OR area, and has done another map of the Boise, ID region. She traced the roots of technology in those areas to just two anchor tenants apiece. In Portland’s case, it was Tektronix and Intel, while Boise had Hewlett-Packard and Micron Technology.

Besides uncovering a more diversified mix of technologies in Seattle—software, aerospace, wireless, Internet—the survey uncovered some interesting insights about how companies get going. The idea of a sole charismatic founder is usually wrong, …Next Page »

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Mark Emkjer has resigned as CEO and director at San Diego’s Accelrys (NASDAQ: ACCL), which develops software for computer-aided design and modeling. The company says its board has named Todd Johnson as interim CEO.

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From the minute he took the job as Washington state’s biotech ambassador, Jack Faris had a dream of making this mysterious business a little less intimidating, a little more embraceable, for the general public. Faris, a career ad man who helped Boeing airplanes capture the public imagination, wanted to do the same thing for an industry that aspires to create more effective new medicines.

Now Faris, 62, is retiring after almost four years since taking the job as president of the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association. So it’s a good time to look back on how he performed. He officially hands over the group’s leadership job to Chris Rivera on Wednesday.

The biggest accomplishment on Faris’s watch came when Gov. Christine Gregoire jawboned the legislature to establish a 10-year, $350 million fund to spur more commercialization of basic biomedical research in the state. The idea, which took years of industry lobbying, was to strengthen the region’s competitive standing versus the world leaders in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area. But as Gregoire herself reminded the industry at its annual meeting in October, she put a lot of her political capital into this initiative, and it passed the state Senate by just one vote. Nobody could argue that biotech in Washington has amassed anything close to the clout of the aerospace giant Boeing, which has proven it can get new laws written when it threatens to move out of the state.

“With Boeing, there’s an understanding of the economic significance of it to the region, and a civic pride,” Faris says. “We’re building progress on both fronts with the life sciences sector.”

Faris is the first to admit he doesn’t have much data to back up this assertion. But he pointed to a couple examples that he finds encouraging. One is from a statewide poll of 507 voters in June. They were asked two questions related to the biotech industry. The first was simply whether people agree or disagree that Washington state has an extraordinary opportunity to be a world center for global health innovation—89 percent agreed. The second question asked people to rank, on a scale of 0 to 10, how important the life sciences sector is to the future of the region, with 0 being unimportant, and 10 being extremely important. People gave life sciences an 8.2 score, he says.

There is no comparative data to say whether this is improved from when Faris took the job, or to say how this stacks up with other industries, like aerospace, software, coffee, or retailing.

Even so, Faris said he senses progress in raising the profile of the life sciences industry. He was one of the people who pushed the idea that the movers and shakers at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce build their 2008 annual leadership retreat around the theme of strengthening the region as a …Next Page »

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Against the backdrop of a worsening recession, San Diego’s innovation community came together for the 21st annual “Most Innovative Products” awards luncheon today in La Jolla. The event is intended to showcase new products introduced over the past year in eight categories that reflect technology clusters, such as wireless communications, medical devices, and aerospace and security technologies that are concentrated in the region.

“Whenever I think of these communities of innovation, I think we’ll come out of this okay,” said Connect CEO Duane Roth, referring to the economic downturn that has dominated recent headlines. Connect, the non-profit organization that has organized the awards since 1987, promotes innovative technologies by helping provide entrepreneurs with the information and resources they need to build a business.

More than 800 people registered for the event at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, in the heart of San Diego’s technology center. This year’s winners were culled from 24 finalists, which were selected from more than 100 nominations, and included the first tie in the history of the award—for Aerospace and Security Technologies.

The nine categories and the companies that received Connect’s most innovative products award are:

—Action and Sports Technologies: The “Direct Drive” surfboard design …Next Page »

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Here at Xconomy we usually focus on technologies already hitting the marketplace rather than laboratory-stage investigations. But last week we got wind of a project that’s so cool we just had to write about it: an effort to build tiny robot planes with flexible structures and built-in reflexes that would allow them to ricochet off walls or objects unharmed and recover their flight paths, the same way house flies bounce off windows.

They’re called “biomimetic micro air vehicles” or MAVs, and they’re the subject of a study at Harvard University and Andover, MA-based Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) that just won funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. PSI does contract R&D work on aerospace, energy, environmental, manufacturing, and medical technologies, and the eventual goal of the MAV project would be to create new kinds of indoor reconnaissance or surveillance craft, carrying tiny cameras, chemical sensors, and the like.

I got the lowdown on the project last week from Tom Vaneck, Physical Sciences’ vice president of space technologies and manager of disruptive technologies—of which the fly-like MAVs would certainly be one. Last time I talked with Vaneck, he was the head of Aurora Flight Sciences‘ Cambridge, MA-based R&D lab; he says he left the aerospace contractor for PSI earlier this year because “I am from a technology sense a little bit ADD,” and that at PSI, “I’m able to have my fingers in many different technology pies.”

Vaneck says there are two fundamental things to think about when a flying object hits a non-moving object. “One, how do you design a structure that can withstand the impact—because if the structure breaks or you are no longer able to generate lift or thrust, you’re done. Two, how do you recover without having to do a lot of environmental sensing or sophisticated computation—you need a method that’s almost instinctual, that automatically reorients the vehicle so that it can fly again.”

Well, those are both problems that evolution—”which has had a long, long time and an infinite budget,” in Vaneck’s words—has already solved. “When a fly hits a window it doesn’t fall down; it goes on to do it a hundred more times,” Vaneck notes.

So PSI is putting the $100,000, Phase 1 Air Force grant into a joint study with Robert Wood, a builder of biologically inspired robots at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory; he’s the creator of the world’s first artificial insect wing with enough lift to get itself off the ground. Together, researchers from PSI and Wood’s lab will study how houseflies and dragonflies recover from collisions, and think about materials such as carbon-fiber composites and a control system that could be used to duplicate the behavior.

The control system may be the harder problem to solve, since it will actually require the engineers to abandon most of the traditional principles of controlled flight. “If you think about a fly, its wing-beating motion if almost a resonant condition,” says Vaneck. “The fly is not continually thinking about moving its wings up and down. Its nervous system just creates a stimulus such that the wings flap, and through their design they generate lift. Now, after a collision, maybe one wing is generating more lift than the other; the control simply needs to go from one resonant condition to another. We think we can manage that without a computer. You just need a mechanism with several ’set points’ that it can switch between.”

Vaneck hopes the 9-month, Phase 1 grant will give the researchers enough time to build a simple prototype and “understand enough of how nature does this to map this over to a man-made system.” Then PSI will apply for a larger, longer Phase 2 grant that would lead to the construction of a working, remote-controlled MAV. “If we can make this work, it will fundamentally change the way people operate small unmanned aircraft,” he says.

I couldn’t resist asking Vaneck whether he ever worries that his work might result in the kinds of creepy insectoid probes often shown in movies like The Matrix or Minority Report. “You can’t help but think about that,” he answers. “Any technology can be morphed into something that is unintended. And there is this visceral reaction—if a movie gadget has to be evil and nasty, it is probably going to look like an insect. But the flip side of that is that insects are very robust systems.”

Vaneck also points out that a robot plane that looked and behaved like an insect might have the advantage of stealth. “If it’s truly bouncing around like an insect,” he says, “maybe it gets overlooked, because it kind of looks like something from the natural world.”

Of course, there’s a flip side to that as well: One good swing of the flyswatter could destroy a very expensive gadget.

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Here’s an idea worthy of Tom Swift: Send a big, long-range unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) such as Northrup Grumman’s Global Hawk into a battle area with a flock of smaller, bird-sized robot planes in its belly. Jettison the baby planes for short-range, low-altitude, low-speed reconnaissance missions, then lower a cable to recapture them, one by one, before bringing the whole flock home.

That’s the scenario envisioned by engineers at MIT and Aurora Flight Sciences, a Manassas, VA, defense contractor with a major R&D lab in Cambridge, MA. Last week Aurora won a Small Business Innnovative Research contract from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for an initial study of the concept, which hinges on the development of an innovative cable system for retrieving so-called micro air vehicles (MAVs). The cable could be the solution to the biggest problem in aerial recovery scenarios: the speed mismatch between large and small craft.

“If you have a larger UAV, it can fly very fast for long distances, but it can’t fly slowly and look around in a city, for example,” says James Peverill, an embedded systems engineer at Aurora’s Cambridge lab. “But a smaller UAV can go down and look around at things more carefully. If you combine those two regimes, you can bring about a new capability.” The issue is that that “you can’t dock the two planes without some additional work,” says Peverill, because they can’t match speeds the way a fighter jet and a refueling tanker can.

You might not think that simply lowering a cable from a larger UAV would help, since the end of the cable would be moving just as fast as the mother ship. But Peverill and colleagues in the laboratory of MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics are investigating a twist on the idea—literally.

If the larger craft flies in circles, Peverill and his colleague believe, the circular motion, together with aerodynamic drag, will cause the lower end of the cable to trace a smaller circle—meaning that “the end of the cable will be traveling slower than the large UAV,” he says. So much slower, in fact, that a MAV could approach and dock with it, in the same way a fighter hooks into the drogue basket of a tanker’s refueling hose.

The approach, code-named Sky Cowboy, has never been tried with robotic vehicles, according to Peverill—but it’s likely to be less violent and less potentially damaging than other ideas for air-to-air retrieval, such as having a large UAV fly up behind an MAV and snag it with a hook.

Aurora’s nine-month Phase I grant of about $100,000 will allow Aurora and its research partner for Sky Cowboy, MIT Aero/Astro professor Jonathan How, to test the idea on a small scale using the Real-time indoor Autonomous Vehicle test Environment (RAVEN), a motion-capture facility at MIT’s Aerospace Controls Laboratory. (We last wrote about How when he was helping a team of students build MIT’s DARPA Urban Challenge robot car.) You’ve probably seen “making-of” videos about digitally animated Hollywood movies like The Polar Express or Beowulf, where actors dress up in body suits covered with targets and their recorded movements are used to guide the motion of digital models. RAVEN does the same thing with model aircraft.

“It’s very expensive and difficult to instrument a radio-controlled plane to know where it is in a room,” says Peverill. “But if you use the motion-capture system, you can know exactly where it is without adding anything to the plane except the targets.” For the Sky Cowboy tests, targets will also be attached to a cable dangling from a radio-controlled plane that’s flying in circles, allowing researchers to measure whether the end of the cable behaves as predicted.

The RAVEN data may also be used to construct a digital model that could enable the team to explore various configurations for the cable, says Peverill. If the results are encouraging, they could help Aurora lasso a much larger Phase 2 grant to fund development of a full-scale prototype system.

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Chicago-based aerospace giant Boeing said today that it has finalized the purchase, for an undisclosed sum, of San Diego’s Tapestry Solutions, a 350-employee company that specializes in command-and-control, modeling, and simulation software for military and security organizations. The acquisition was first announced September 26.

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The way Alfredo Ramirez talks, the Global Hawk does not epitomize an avant-garde aerospace design—even though the robotic spy plane operates at the uppermost boundaries of advanced military aircraft.

The 46-year-old Ramirez is the lead designer for the Global Hawk, a high-altitude UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle. I recently sat down with him to discuss his work on the Global Hawk, a conversation that amounted to his first public conversation about aerospace innovation.

With a bulbous nose and a ‘V’ shaped tail, the Global Hawk looks vaguely like a flying beluga whale. The fuselage is 47.6 feet long—–half the length of a Boeing 737 jetliner—but its wings are thin and unusually long, giving the craft a total wingspan of 130.9 feet.

The Global Hawk is capable of flying 35 hours and operating at 65,000 feet—or approximately 12 to 13 miles above the Earth’s surface. It carries no weapons, but the latest model holds 3,000 pounds of surveillance equipment, including advanced “synthetic aperture” radar, as well as electro-optical and infrared sensors that can provide high-resolution images of an area as big as Alabama.

A typical mission these days calls for the Global Hawk to take off from California’s Beale Air Force Base and fly autonomously to the Mideast. There it can patrol high above the Syrian and Iranian borders with Iraq for nearly 24 hours. Radar and sensor data is transmitted directly from the spy plane via satellite to mission control in California for dissemination to U.S. military commanders in Iraq.

Ramirez says the Global Hawk reflects an incremental progression from previous designs, as well as the need to constantly balance the demands of cost, performance, and risk.

Still, the craft was sexy enough to serve as a background prop in this year’s superhero movie, Iron Man, a cinematic homage to advanced technology and robotics-laden special effects. The design also won
the 2000 Collier Trophy, the industry’s top aeronautical achievement, awarded annually by the National Aeronautic Association.

To Ramirez, however, the spy plane with no cockpit and a single jet engine mounted atop its fuselage represents a fairly conventional aircraft design.

“Aircraft design is usually evolutionary, rarely is it revolutionary,” he says. Wing design is a perfect example, he says. “You do iterations. You make them longer, wider, thinner, shorter—and then you run calculations to analyze each design.”

The Global Hawk was developed in the mid-1990s at Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical, a San Diego aerospace company that was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 1999. When Ramirez joined Teledyne Ryan’s advanced development group in 1985 as a freshly graduated aerospace engineer from San Diego State University, the company already had extensive experience developing jet-powered drones that had flown reconnaissance missions over Vietnam.

Ramirez says he gained experience working on several …Next Page »

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