Employees of Hoverfly Technologies, George Sapp, Al Ducharme, Stacey Ducharme and Daniel Burroughs fly one of their smaller multi-rotor copters while holding two larger models outside of their offices at the UCF Business Incubator program in Winter Springs.
Moist air sticks to the skin and trees stretch for miles around, engulfing the most bio-diverse rainforest in the world. Insects search for their next victim while tropical birds flutter nearby, and Shawn F. McCracken, a Texas State University biologist and ecologist, is in the thick of it.
Flying 150 feet over the Amazonian rainforest, he takes pictures and video of the diverse canopies without lifting a foot off a platform in the treetops below.
The flight controller system from Hoverfly Technologies has taken his research to the next level. McCracken first utilized the company’s system while exploring the Yasuni National Park of Ecuador in the summer of 2010. The technology has enabled him to launch and maneuver a camera that was mounted to a multi-rotor copter through small openings in the rainforest habitat to collect data for research purposes.
“We aren’t doing the coolest thing with it — it’s the customers that are really doing the coolest things,” Hoverfly President and CEO Dr. Al Ducharme said. “They’re inspecting dams and bridges and looking at rainforest foliage. Doing things we hadn’t imagined.”
Hoverfly is part of the University of Central Florida Business Incubator in Winter Springs, which provides young companies with the opportunity for growth.
Future of the technology
McCracken looks forward to a new outdoor navigation add-on that will be available in the next few months that includes a GPS that will provide added functionality for outdoor flight.
“With the future release of their GPS add-on controller, users like myself will be able to acquire this high-res imagery with greater precision and the ability to geo-reference such data,” McCracken said. “The future contributions of this technology to my research are endless.”
The company has also built a multi-rotor copter that they can fly indoors and around the office to test the latest software. This indoor navigation add-on is still in the works, but the new technology will include sensors that will allow altitude hold and obstacle avoidance indoors.
The employees envision a future where movie sets no longer need cranes or helicopters to videotape a scene, said Stacey Durcharme, vice president of marketing and sales, adding that they strive to make the flight controller system user-friendly enough so that anybody can use it.
“If we could be the de facto, standard, go-to product for the movie industry in five years, I think that would be amazing,” Stacey said. “That would be a dream goal I think.”
Hoverfly is born
Hoverfly Technologies started out as a sole proprietorship that Chief Technology Officer George Sapp maintained from his apartment under the name of Quadpowered. As a start-up company, the employees of Hoverfly Technologies said they were nervous when they placed a manufacturing order for their flight controller system in September 2010.
“We actually broke even within the first 24 hours of opening the store,” Al said. “So after four or five weeks, there were still people ordering boards, and we didn’t have them yet to cover the manufacturing order that we had placed.”
Once Sapp sold about 200 of the first board and could not keep up with the orders, he formed a company called Hoverfly Technologies, named after an insect that flies front-to-back and side-to-side and hovers like a mockingbird.
“It’s really the textbook case of how a company starts,” Al said. “Initially George just put in a couple hundred of dollars to get things going and it has been bootstrapped ever since.”
To help expand the company, the UCF Florida Business Incubator provided business development meetings, accountants, seminars and coaching from the director and the advisor of the program.
Not only has the business received support from the incubator, but the community, especially their local manufacturing company, Quality Manufacturing Systems, has been behind them throughout the whole process.
“Everywhere we have gone, from the business office to register to the post office, I just want to say how welcoming the business community is and how proactive they have been in supporting the growth of local companies here.” Stacey said.
“We look forward to trying to stay in Seminole County and grow and eventually hire people.”