CruiseAder: We dream of engineering a product designed for people
When the team behind CruiseAder started the project, their intent was to provide an aerial solution for wildlife conservation. Later, in pursuit of higher education, the team realized that the project had a bigger potential and decided to commercialize their innovation.
CruiseAder is one of the latest startups of the KTH Innovation pre-incubator, and was approved in the beginning of this summer. The core members of the team are Kavithasan Patkunam, Samay Sigamani, Sivabalan Jayachandran and Logesh Sadasivam. They are all studying for their Masters in Aerospace Engineering, Production Engineering and Management and started the idea of CruiseAder together.
– We are developing a modular hybrid drone we call Claire, that will take off and land like a copter and will cruise like a winged airplane. The objective is to have longer air time endurance to perform various airborne missions, from collecting visually processed data, transmitting to the customers and making it available for them in the cloud, Kavithasan Patkunam Says.
Aerial solution for wildlife conservation
The vision of CruiseAder is to be an aerial personal assistant for every consumer, says the team, and the idea was brought to mind when they wanted to provide an aerial solution for wildlife conservation.
– Being aerospace engineers, we wanted to bridge the advantages of a copter type and a winged type of a drone, to extend its performance and payload carrying capacity. This way we thought a drone could do more complex operations and serve many fields at a very low operational cost. It is indeed a time saving choice for anyone who wanted to have a bird's eye view on their subject of interest and have ready-processed data of aerial imagery, Kavithasan Patkunam says.
What is the market like for this kind of product?
– There are many areas where aerial imagery data could be of great help, rapidly assessing professional or personal activities. We could sense a huge potential for Claire in different market segments such as agriculture, wildlife conservation, industrial survey and inspections but also in filmmaking.
KTH Innovation valuable support
The CruiseAder team came into contact with KTH Innovation after a breakfast meeting at the end of 2015. Shortly thereafter, they met with their business coach Siimon Vaske and have been developing their idea together with KTH Innovation ever since. In June, the case was accepted to the KTH Innovation pre-incubator and the team is very happy with the support they’ve been given.
– KTH Innovation has provided us abundant support with regard to business, intellectual property rights, the organizational structure and business strategies. Some key things that we have been taught in this process are to have a lateral view on "how to stand out among the competition" and "making a product for customers". All this input collectively and positively changed our whole idea of business and we have conducted our entrepreneurial pursuit with customer focus, says Kavithasan Patkunam.
Finally, what are your thoughts about entrepreneurship and innovation?
– CruiseAder has it in its DNA that innovation is the only way we could help society transform technically and harmoniously. We dream of engineering a product designed for people and entrepreneurship seemed like an excellent channel.
Emelie Södergren
emesod@kth.se
Do you want to know more about CruiseAder?
Visit their website here!