LiquidPiston debuts basketball-sized 25hp rotary engine

Bloomfield, Connecticut-based engine and hybrid power systems developer LiquidPiston plans to commercialize its XTS-210, 25hp, two-stroke, supercharged, liquid-cooled, 210cc rotary engine. The company’s plan builds upon a $9 million U.S. Army development contract to develop a prototype core engine based on the XTS-210 design for military applications.

Compared to current diesel piston engines, the XTS-210 design reduces size and weight by nearly 80%, while maintaining comparable power output.

The X-Engine has two primary moving parts – a rotor and shaft. The XTS-210 adds up to one bar of boost through supercharging and operates as a two-stroke, producing six combustion events per revolution of the rotor, to deliver smooth power from a lightweight package about the size of a basketball.

The XTS-210 is targeted at commercial and military heavy-fuel applications, including primary or hybrid-electric propulsive power for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft and small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS). LiquidPiston also received a $1.7 million Army contract to power a hybrid-electric VTOL UAV demonstrator, bringing the company’s Department of Defense contracts total to more than $30 million.

LiquidPiston is targeting delivery of an XTS-210 prototype to the U.S. Army in 2024.

https://www.liquidpiston.com/xts-210-engine-liquidpiston

MIT algorithm herds drones

Multiple drones simultaneously relaying time-sensitive information over a wireless network can create a data traffic jam. Any information that gets through is too stale to be useful.

In response, MIT engineers developed a wireless network to handle a high load of time-sensitive data coming from multiple sources. Their method, WiSwarm, configures a wireless network to control the flow of information from multiple sources while ensuring the network is relaying the freshest data.

The team tweaked a conventional Wi-Fi router and showed the tailored network could prioritize and relay fresh data to keep multiple drones on task.

In most networking protocols, it’s first in, first out. Co-researcher Vishrant Tripathi explains, “A video frame comes in, you process it. Another comes in, you process it. But if your task is time-sensitive, such as trying to detect where a moving object is, then all the old video frames are useless. What you want is the newest video frame.”

The team incorporated a last in, first out protocol for multiple robots using conventional wireless networks. Because a wireless channel can quickly clog up when multiple sources simultaneously send data, WiSwarm runs on a centralized computer to prioritize multiple data streams.

The team tested their algorithm by flying drones, each carrying a small camera and a Wi-Fi computer chip to relay images of small vehicles moving on the ground to a central computer.

With WiSwarm, the computer received the freshest images from the most relevant drones, which it used to command the drones to stay on the vehicles’ track.

https://news.mit.edu