Transcript

Dare to defy gravity | Richard Browning | TEDxGlasgow

[Music] it's not often in life when um you see circumstances align in a way that gives you an opportunity to have a run at a challenge that either you think is maybe Beyond you or maybe you even imagine is not necessarily possible those circumstances really came together for me uh when I look back around 18 months 15 months ago and it's the journey since then that I'd like to share with you uh here so the starting point was this rather audacious unusual idea that we hatched around could you challenge flight or could you challenge the way that humans have flown um and come at it from a different angle so rather than put the human being inside a helicopter or an aircraft what about if you augmented the human Mind and Body in a way that gave you just the missing ingredients in order to achieve flight in an entirely different way reasons for doing this no reasons other than having a massive amount of fun um I'm going to run first of all just something rather than me doing any of this um there's something that just really gets across I think uh when I say about the human mind and body gets across a really nice example of uh what I'm talking about here I you don't really need uh need me to show this to you but uh um what you'll see is a training partner of mine in uh in London uh Denton doing the kind of stuff that if you needed any examples of how amazing the human mind or body can be if you train them then this is a good example so it's pretty impressive stuff and uh core to this journey has been I suppose my passion for for believing in what's possible if you focus that that mind and body on a Target on a on a on an objective now what's missing though is uh that ingredient that technology piece so we went out and uh got ourselves this was the very first sort of Ground Zero test of um the technology that we thought might well be the miss that that magic missing ingredient this is a little micro gas turbine and this was me with a mop bucket in a lane having a go at seeing whether or we could dismiss most of the concerns that were out there around how you'd be able to manage this and that worked really well so there's another obvious step that we went to which is we got ourselves a field and bought another one and then had a little go at experimenting and trying to learn the balance and control the real hero here is uh if you look closely in the background of the uh footage you can see there somebody trying to do some alotment kind of gardening there uh after a while just gives up um and you see in a minute I try and um when I finish Greening at the camera um you see me trying to hold them out horizontal and you get some idea of the there about 45 kilos of push I'm I'm trying to withstand there unsuccessfully so um again you know only one sensible place to go after that go and get yourself four um and bounce around in this case in an old farmyard um and this was pretty compelling you can see you know the the the thrust and stability control was starting to get really good we went down some pretty unusual uh directions as well so this was an experiment trying to um trying to uh trying to see if apart from having them on the legs um the idea of suspending you know myself would be a nice way of going actually it didn't work at all the extra stability I got from the back was just really hard to manage it would obviously slacken off as I lifted and then it would come back in hard as I lowered again so that didn't really work um falling over you know learning by failing key theme of this whole journey uh really important in you know a really important way of learning about what works and what doesn't that was an example where we pinched a fuel line it was it got caught slightly in my elbow joint and I just pinched it and that was a result getting out there learning by failing literally falling over has been critical to this we went down to some really interesting dead ends as well in a sort of weird evolutionary thing this is the three-headed nightmare kind of thing this was three engines on each arm so that's now pushing about 70 kilos of thrust 65 kilos of thrust on each arm that was kind of silly it was fun to mess around doing it but um and we started to get more and more uh progress um to our surprise this started to really come together this is now two engines on each arm and an engine on each leg and you can see from these little Clips um it was really starting to to kind of surprisingly come together um and what we ended up doing was uh and it caught us slightly by surprise it was just all these lots of little incremental steps uh that finally culminated into this next little clip which I'm really proud of it still sends a little shiver down my spine because this was the moment when this endeavor went from you know short surely not this is just goofing around as with a lot of kind of extreme innovative ideas you never really know if you're going to get there it might you might just put the whole thing in the bin at the end of it but this is the moment when the bin went away yeah I'm I'm uh I still love that moment that that as you can see from my face that was uh that was like oh my god I've just thank you yeah thank you that that that was that was that was I still like that um then from there really falling over was still critical part of the journey that I did that in front of our Red Bull friends that was great um that was a problem with the fuel tank that very flat looking of my three fuel tanks on my back that was empty uh it had drawn it had emptied twice as quick as the other two another good learning but really it was a question of refining from there and it's really fun as I just play these these uh other little clips from a couple months back uh to reflect on that starting hypothesis that the human mind and body when given the right chance can learn to do some pretty cool stuff I can't even skateboard this is not about me being some some special capability or anything um that balance and stability that you're seeing up there that is all down to the brain's uh capacity to to retune balance so you know doing that if you build a robot to do that that's pretty impressive I i' I've learned to do that probably for with only an hour and a half in the saddle doing that and it's all down to apart from the engineering being you know kind of well done um it's all down to the fact that the brain can can can learn to adapt and and control this equipment in a really quite elegant way so so um and I I'll I'll flick to a just about a 30 second clip of um something from only two weeks ago because in terms of where we're going this is just scraping the surface we only launched this about to the public only about two months ago and uh it's just kind of got people very excited it seems and we're now spending the whole time traveling around the world bringing this to events and displays um I I'll I'll kick off this uh this little clip this is quite cool this is starting to push the speed boundary now um yeah this is this is great fun I actually involuntarily whooped on the return Journey here but no one can hear me cuz it's God awful noisy um but uh apart from doing Vents and displays which is great fun um we're also working on the S of phase 2 system this is really a cobble together prototype frankly it's taught us so much though and all of that knowledge is going into the second version which is going to make this look like just like Char's play so that's kind of really fun and we're even tentatively starting to think about probably in the next few months starting to look for kind of Pilots two and three so if there's any people out there that fancy having a go maybe um but really if I if I take a step back and um uh and consider this journey you know I've spent U 15 years in a in a relatively normal job you know in a corporate career um and I think what I'd like to think we've demonstrated here is the sheer power of having an idea and then caring less about whether it's impossible or ridiculous or whatever and just getting out there in a safe and sensible way reasonably sensible getting out there and just trying it and learning from doing there's about half a dozen reasons why this should not work work and we could have done a desk study 18 months ago and written it off but just shows the power if you get out there and learn from doing and literally learn from failing and falling over and and that's apart from pushing the boundaries of human flight I think it's the inspiration I'd like to think we're we're bringing on this journey that also is you know certainly really close to my heart so thank you very much