Baldwin Mono Tiltrotor (MTR)

AviationWeek.com

Persistence Pays Off For Mono Tiltrotor Inventor

Oct 23, 2009

By Graham Warwick

Douglas Baldwin is a familiar presence at conferences, explaining and promoting his Mono Tiltrotor (MTR) concept for a vertical-takeoff-and-landing unmanned aircraft. Persistence is paying off—Baldwin Technology has just won a significant contract from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) to advance the design of a ship-based cargo UAV.

As an inventor, Baldwin’s advice is to fully develop the idea, understand the market, patent the essential idea, publish everything, “and accept what you will learn about self-interest and organizational behavior” in trying to get the idea off the ground.

“Anyone who takes the path of an innovator will learn that meeting an executive who has the word ‘innovation’ in their job title or job description is not necessarily the same as meeting someone whose actions support innovation,” Baldwin says, based on experience with the small rotorcraft industry subculture.

For the MTR, “the essential idea simply was to suspend a payload about an aircraft’s pitch axis using a freely rotating shaft with rigid struts at either end,” he says. The patent draft isolated that idea in a simple written legal claim, then conceived a wide range of embodiments to carve out a broad space for development of an optimal design.

“I decided from the beginning to adopt the open-source software development model of publishing everything on the Internet,” he says. “As a new entrant to the industry, public disclosure gave us access to a wealth of experience in our search for a reasonable truth.”

Baldwin solicited feedback from experts, who pointed out technical flaws, helping the MTR configuration evolve. “Any fundamentally new idea is initially assumed by experts to be fundamentally flawed,” he says. “In the end, the idea of a pitch-axis-suspended load survived intense scrutiny.”

The first patent was filed in 2001, and the design evolved from a civil roadable aircraft with ducted coaxial propeller to a military unmanned cargo aircraft with tilting coaxial prop-rotor and wing panels that aerodynamically deploy in forward flight. “The only constant was the idea of a pitch-axis-suspended payload,” Baldwin says.

After initially targeting the civil market, he concluded that a “new aircraft configuration must first succeed in the U.S. military market. . . . The essential idea of the innovation was held constant and, after accounting for all technical constraints and market realities, a cargo unmanned aircraft system design emerged.”

ONR provided the first research funding in response to a white paper drafted for Baldwin by the University of Maryland, but despite promising conclusions from that study, it took congressional budget additions to continue work with U.S. Army funding. By 2008, Baldwin was ready to close out the work when the U.S. Marine Corps asked him to look at turning the proposed MTR scaled demonstrator into a cargo UAV. The new ONR contract is a step in that direction."

Click to expand...

yasotay said:

A motivated inventor who refuses to take "no" for an answer from the establishment. He has been at it for over five years now I think. I think he has survived on Congressional support. I am not sure if there is any utility in his aircraft but I think it would work.

Click to expand...

great to have you here !

Click to expand...

Have already bookmarked your site and will follow further news and developments.

Click to expand...

Are there any sources available about the early designs mentioned by Aviation Week ?

Click to expand...