US University Innovation Award Winner
When Patric Hruswicki was a mere three weeks old, his parents snapped a photo of him alongside a Remote-Control helicopter. And with a father who flew gliders as a member of the Polish military, it seems that he was destined for a career in some aspect of aviation or aerospace engineering.
Consider it destiny fulfilled! Indeed, Patric is a master’s degree student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL, where he concentrates on unmanned aircraft systems and other initiatives as the lead project manager in the university’s Eagle Flight Research Center. He is also widely known for his proficiencies as a RC pilot through his more than 20 years of experience designing, building, and testing model aircraft.
Very impressively, he is already applying all the lessons he’s learned in the classroom and all the skills he’s developed at the EFRC for humanitarian purposes. He is the project manager of TALON Lift, the university’s entrant in the global GoAERO challenge to develop a new classification of flying vehicles that can more efficiently and effectively respond to catastrophic extreme weather incidents and other life-altering emergencies than helicopters, small drones, and ambulances.
The countless hours of hard work he and his teammates have put into this endeavor have alreadypaid off nicely: TALON Lift is one of 14 teams selected to receive funds from GoAERO with support from NASA’s University Innovation project.
“I’m very excited by GoAERO,” Patric exclaims, explaining that it is a unique opportunity to develop eVTOL technologies and tailor these innovations for specialized emergency rescue applications. My goal, and the goal of everyone on the team, is to gain hands-on experience in creating practical, market-ready solutions while enhancing emergency response capabilities.”
Team member Giol Vinyals-I-Roca wholeheartedly agrees with this assessment. The 19-year-old native of Catalonia and freshman at Embry-Riddle notes that “for as long as I can remember I was always looking to the skies.”
Then his parents gave him a birthday present that “propelled” him on his life’s course by igniting his interest in aviation and emergency rescue.
“It was a small RC helicopter that had a Red Cross on it, and I would play with it with my brothers, using Lego figures to simulate rescue missions,” Giol relates. “What I loved most was the challenge of fixing it whenever it crashed, which fueled my curiosity about how things worked. This early experience planted the seed of a dream: to one day create a real flying machine that could save lives."
For Victor Cova, another member of the 10-person international team, a career in aviation or aerospace engineering also seemed like a birthright. The 20-year-old Embry-Riddle junior from Madrid explains that both his parents are engineers whose passion for their profession was passed down to him from an early age.
“I was always on that same path,” Victor recalls. “I would always go to summer camps that focused on aviation. And I was always building planes and rockets with LEGOS and using the blocks in the Minecraft video games. Then when I was six, I went on my first plane trip to South America and quickly realized how impressive it was to be able to fly. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
For teammate Jonathan “Jon” Schroder, a 30-year-old senior studying mechanical engineering and shop manager at the EFRC, the draw of GoAERO is the opportunity it provides to “solve problems. I get a real rush when I learn how something works, and I can use the knowledge to solve other problems. In this case, the solve is creating something that will make people’s lives better.”
Patric is confident that TALON Lift has certain attributes that will go a long way in achieving this very goal. He points out that the team members come from diverse backgrounds in terms of their academic experiences, from aerospace to electrical and mechanical engineering. They also are at different levels in their university standing, from undergraduate to doctorate levels. And the team has myriad experience in the various disciplines that it will take to develop a flyer to meet all the GoAERO requirements, including UAV design and regulations, flight control systems, and aircraft maintenance.
This diversity of expertise, when synthesized into a unified and cohesive team, naturally produces impressive results, he says.
It comes also in the form of the flyer they call TALON, – Technology for Airborne Lifesaving and Operational Needs – “a cost-effective, rapidly deployable solution for medical evacuations and search-and-rescue operations,” Patric explains. “Its simplicity, and adaptive landing gear set us apart from our competitors, allowing for safe operations in diverse terrains and conditions. We aim to be a very adaptive and modular solution for all types of emergencies.”
He describes the TALON flyer as a drone designed to safely evacuate a human occupant from any medical emergency scenario. The design prioritizes the occupant’s safety by centrally locating them within an H-frame quadrotor configuration. It is being fabricated using commercially available off-the-shelf components, allowing for an affordable, feasible and functional solution. The design includes a novel landing gear system capable of adapting its length autonomously to enable landing in complex and varied terrain.
Patric believes another competitive advantage his team has in the GoAERO competition is its secret weapon – its captain, Dr. Kyle Collins. Dr. Collins is the EFRC director whose extensive experience in aerospace research, focusing on advanced flight control systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) technologies, has contributed to several groundbreaking projects in electric and hybrid propulsion, flight automation, and FAA safety research. Dr. Collins is also a competitive aerobatic pilot, team captain of the US Advanced Aerobatic Team, and 2024 national champion in that category.
One of those groundbreaking projects is PAVER (Personal Air Vehicle Embry-Riddle, a quad-heli-UAV drone used to test failure scenarios. The PAVER pioneered technologies enabling a quadcopter UAV to fly beyond the failure of one rotor, which was a huge breakthrough in safety and redundancy of vehicle controls and design.
For Giol, who spends a lot of time mountain trekking and skiing, this breakthrough is critical to what the team is striving to manufacture. During his climbs, it struck him that in a life-or-death situation high on a mountain, there isn’t a practical solution for rescue. The cost and complexity of high-altitude helicopter rescues make them unfeasible for anything less than extreme emergencies, but even so helicopters are not always available, and they can be grounded by bad weather, leaving no options at all.
Hence, the essentiality of the TALON. Despite the critical need for such a flyer, and despite the team’s collective experience, however, members all acknowledge there are considerable challenges, the biggest of which they say is system integration.
“With infinite configurations to choose from, selecting the most efficient one can be difficult,” Patric points out. “To address this problem, we are focusing on quickly developing iterations, enabling a fail-fast approach: rapid development and testing, learning, and refining. This allows for an expedited learning curve and prompt bug-fixing and improvement. Our goal is to create the simplest vehicle that will achieve the objectives, reducing failure points.”
Also assisting in closing the learning curve has been the GoAERO webinars, hosted by the world’s leading experts in their respective aviation and aerospace engineering fields. The team cites the webinars as great at getting industry professionals’ views on how to approach different problems.
With the webinars, with all their diverse experiences in the classroom and at the EFRC, there is one intangible characteristic that Patric says really sets TALON Lift apart: passion. “As a team, we're not just passionate about building aircraft – we also love flying them!”
To highlight your GoAERO Team, contact us at info@goaeroprize.com.
REMINDER: Stage 2 Registration Documents are available here.
Benefits for Teams can be found here.
