As part of our presence at SPIE’s Defense, Security & Sensing conference and trade show, LaserMotive was interviewed by the local Fox TV affiliate WOFL on the topic of laser power beaming. Company president Tom Nugent spoke with WOFL’s reporter. The station also shot footage of the various electric helicopters and aircraft on display, including the fully functioning laser powered micro helicopter.

“Laser power beaming continues to gain awareness, both with industry professionals as well as the public,” says Tom, “and the interest in the general news media at this level helps confirm this.”

In addition to WOFL, LaserMotive had meetings with select trade media during the Exhibition, including Photonics Online and Unmanned Vehicles Magazine. We’ll post more as coverage comes out.

LaserMotive will be pitching to investors at the Space Angels Network (SAN) in Los Angeles and Palo Alto on March 31st. The event is open to accredited investors only. Contact SAN for more information if you qualify.

After a short hiatus, we’re back to blogging.  We’ve had a very busy past few weeks (including a trip to Washington DC). In D.C., we had meetings with a variety of organizations (both in the private and public sectors) about our technology and its uses.  We can’t name names at this point, but there is potential there for contracts utilizing our technology in a range of markets.

In addition, we attended the AUVSI Program Review Air Day. We made some good contacts and learned quite a bit as well. LaserMotive also presented to a group at the Pentagon, as well as presented to a defense venture capital group that was were very interested. During all this, we continue work on our entry for the next Power Beaming Competition to be held later this year. Although the dates are still tentative, we expect that this should take place in the second or third quarter of this year.  We’ll share more details as we learn them.

We continue to focus on laying the groundwork for our next level of growth in the upcoming weeks.  All in all, we’ve taken significant steps and made significant contacts in this direction in the past weeks that we believe will come to fruition in upcoming weeks and months.

Dave and I are at Photonics West this week, our first time at the show. (Jordin has attended many times in the past, but couldn’t make it this year.) While the number of booths visited at a trade show is certainly not the best way of measuring “success” when visiting exhibitors (i.e., potential vendors or partners), it’s an easy way to count. So, here’s a bit of trade show math about our progress through the exhibits. There are roughly 40 ‘rows’ of booths (with up to 40 booths per row; those rows with extra large booths reduce that number), spread across two halls at the Moscone Center. We will have at most ~19 hours (spread across three days) to visit the exhibits. That translates to visiting ~2.1 rows per hour if we wanted to see every single booth, however briefly.

On our first day, we did roughly 7 rows in 7 hours, i.e., 1 row/hour. This rate was much below the required average. Why so slow? Dave describes it as the “kid in a candy store” effect — there was so much to see and so many people to talk to, we spent a lot of time talking with vendors at lots of booths.

Today (day 2), we were more aggressive, and wound up covering 17 rows in 7 hours, or ~2.4 rows/hour (even with taking time to say hello to many of the sponsors of Team LaserMotive). That’s a little better than the ‘required’ average, but leaves 16 rows for the last day, a day when we will also be leaving early to catch a plane. In order to cover everything, we will need to average 3.2 rows/hour. Certain categories of product are represented by LOTS of businesses, so now that we’ve seen some of them we can breeze by others. But I suspect we’ll be sprinting down the last few rows before we head to the airport Thursday….

In the closing moments of 2010, not only does the year mark the end of the first decade of the 21st century, but a milestone year as well for LaserMotive and the development of laser power beaming. From an array of industry awards to record breaking laser powered helicopter demos, 2010 has been an important and pivotal year for LaserMotive in our quest to commercialize the wireless transfer of energy via lasers.

From the start of 2010 and just on the heels of its win in the NASA-sponsored Power Beaming Competition (bringing home a purse prize of nearly $1 million), LaserMotive has garnered a number of business and technical achievements throughout the year that we believe will lay the groundwork for even greater ones in the upcoming year. Among the highlights of 2010 are:

• Starting the commercialization of laser power beaming, as LaserMotive used some of the NASA prize money to hire two team members full time.
• Release of our white paper on power beaming to UAVs, which garnered a surprisingly large amount of publicity.
• Attendance at AUVSI trade show in August, along with our public demo of the laser-powered micro-helicopter, flying for as long as 6 hours at a time and setting a record.
• Demo in October of a free-flying laser-powered quadrocopter, barely 2 months after meeting our partners in the endeavor (Ascending Technologies), and setting a number of technical records in the process.
• Receipt of a variety of industry awards, including Seattle Business Magazine’s “Innovators of the Year,” the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum, and winners of the MIT Enterprise Forum’s NW Startup DEMO.

There was lots of work that generated interest from potential customers and partners. We can’t say much about those discussions at present, but hope to be able to share more with you in 2011 as these relationships come to fruition.

We’d like to thank all of you for your support in the past year, and wish you the very best in the upcoming New Year!

The data center where LaserMotive’s website is hosted suffered a short in a large UPS late Tuesday night, which damaged more than 3,000 machines. As a result, our website and email were unavailable for the past two days. Everything seems to be back up now, but if you tried sending us email in the last few days, please try resending it since it may have been lost during the restoration attempts.

We have been hard at work for the last week revamping the LaserMotive website to highlight our growth from only competing in the NASA-sponsored Power Beaming competition, to a commercial endeavor pursuing near-term commercial power beaming. The new site will contain much more information about LaserMotive’s vision of the future of power beaming.

Check back next week to see the completely new look!

It’s no secret that one critical factor in the 2009 competition success of LaserMotive came from extensive testing of the climber at the team’s facility on the specially designed vertical treadmill, which allows the team the opportunity to collect real time data on Otis’s performance, as well as seeing how the machine performs over a full kilometer test without having to leave the office.

Like a car taking practice laps on a racetrack, the treadmill allows the team a chance to test new ideas and combinations to find out what works the best before the actual race begins.

And with a bigger, better goal and prize on the line for Phase 2, it was time for a better treadmill.

Back in January, the entire team took a quick break from working on their individual systems to help topple the 18-foot treadmill, tipping it on to its side to begin work. It is the first time in a year that the giant piece of machinery came down, leaving something of an empty space in the back corner of the team’s shop.

The formerly vertical treadmill. Watch your head!

The plan is to retrofit the treadmill to include a motor-driven wheel that will allow the team to measure the output of the climbing vehicle’s motor, effectively turning the treadmill into a dynamometer.

In addition, the bicycle wheels that guide the cable around the treadmill are being replaced with double-walled wheels to cut down on vibrations created when the cable passes over the spots where the spokes connect to the rims. Such vibrations may not seem like something that could cause such a major difference, but the more accurate the data you can gather, the better your vehicle will be. One of the wheels is also being put on a moving axis to allow the team to control the tension on the cable, which despite being metal can stretch, changing the conditions on the treadmill. Because the cable is a fixed length, the addition of the fifth wheel requires the top of the treadmill to also be lowered some to accommodate the new, wider path of the cable.

It’s a lot of work, but the ability of the team to test and retest the climber in conditions that simulate the real world challenge and make the adjustments based on test results instead of theories is one of the things that helped LaserMotive claim the Level 1 prize in November.

Now the hope is the new and improved treadmill can help get Otis into tip-top shape when the team goes after the Level 2 prize later this year!

As we mentioned before, NASA held a technical symposium and recognition ceremony on February 25th and 26th for all the 2009 Centennial Challenge winners and the allied organizations which ran the competitions. Twitter comments were at #nasacc. Will Pomerantz from the X-Prize Foundation wrote a great summary of the event.

During the Power Beaming session on the 25th, Jordin and Tom gave a presentation on LaserMotive’s technology development for the competition, and the directions we see power beaming going in the future. We were joined in that session by Brian Turner from KCSP, and Ben Shelef from the Spaceward Foundation.

The presentations from the other Challenges were uniformly interesting. As Will Pomerantz commented, it seemed to be true for every competition that “the teams that shared the most information with the general public eventually won the competition.” Over the last few years, we tried sharing what we were doing, and I’d like to work on sharing even more this year. The biggest obstacle is time.

It was interesting, in the middle of the day during the symposium, to hear NASA’s new Chief Technologist, Bob Braun, speak about his new job and his thoughts on the future. And as I tweeted, it was very refreshing to hear someone in his position admit that he didn’t have an answer to a question and, rather than making something up or being non-committal, he said he would work on finding an answer.

The next day was the recognition ceremony. We were honored to be recognized by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

We’re all excited to hear the messages coming from both Chief Technology Braun and Administrator Bolden. They both seem to “get it” and are working to move NASA in the direction of innovating new technologies and supporting industry as they try to innovate, rather than simply operating ‘traditional’ systems. We have high hopes for what we’ll see coming out of NASA in the next few years.

After the ceremony, teams from all the various Challenges got up on stage for one big group photo:

Many thanks to NASA IPP DIrector Doug Comstock and Centennial Challenges Director Andrew Petro for all their hard work for the event!

Tell most people that you are going to Washington, D.C., in February and they’re liable to look at you like you’ve got two heads, but that’s exactly where the majority of the LaserMotive team and their families are headed this week.

As winners of the NASA-sponsored 2009 Power Beaming Competition, LaserMotive is being honored this week at NASA Headquarters, along with other winners of the space agency’s Centennial Challenges, NASA’s prize-driven innovation program.

First Jordin and Tom will be speaking as part of a day-long technical symposium Feb. 25th, discussing LaserMotive’s 2009 competition win along with what we’ll be doing next, as part of a panel with the other Challenge winners.

Then, the next day, the whole team will be honored at a recognition ceremony with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, which is all just really cool.

But the guys aren’t just headed out go sight-seeing. While in D.C., team members will be meeting with technology staffers from the offices of our senators and congresspeople, explaining the business of power beaming and the vast potential it holds for each of their districts.

You know, in case they are looking to get on board with an emerging industry in their own backyard. Hey it’s already created two jobs, right?

Both the tech symposium and the recognition ceremony are scheduled to be broadcast on NASA Television. For the link, schedule and streaming video visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. The symposium is scheduled for 9 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Feb. 25 and the one-hour recognition ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. Feb. 26.