For the past 20 years, architect Greg Henderson has been trying to figure out ways of building safer buildings to withstand earthquakes. Along the way, he came up with a method using electromagnetic fields to separate the building from the ground during an earthquake. But he also realized the technology could be used in plenty of other ways, especially in the field of transportation where similar yet less efficient technology is used in bullet trains called Maglev.
But first, Henderson needed to start small and get some way to capture people's imagination. That's where the Hendo hoverboard comes in.
After two years in stealth mode, Henderson's 19-person startup, Arx Pax, is ready to start talking about the hoverboard and is making the technology inside of it available to the maker crowd on Kickstarter. Arx Pax is looking to raise $250K for the campaign and will sell the technology for $299 in a 12-pound white box it calls the Hover Engine developer kit. Buyers can take the hover tech outside of the box and put it in anything they want to hover. (And for $10,000, you can buy one of the Hendo hoverboards yourself.)
The hover tech inside the development kit is able to carry around 40 pounds. The battery inside the device work at an efficiency of about 40 watts per kilogram. For comparison, a helicopter elevation efficiency is about 160 watts per kilogram.
The current version is also very noisy and only lasts about seven minutes. There are moving parts inside of the engine with an inductor, but the startup hopes to make a quiet solid state version—so no moving parts.
Arx Pax is also working on what it calls the G-Ray, which has the ability to control the hover technology remotely using a controller or a smartphone app the startup is planning on developing.
The Hendo hoverboard may not fulfill everyone's expectations of how a hoverboard should work. Unlike the Back to the Future film series, Hendo cannot fly over hedges and water. The engine requires the board to be on top of conductive materials to serve as a secondary magnetic field—aluminum and copper work, for example, but not steel and nickel. The Los Gatos, CA-based startup has built a mini copper skatepark in the back of its office to test out each version of the board.
The main technological advancement Arx Pax is bringing to the table is the ability to levitate efficiently on passive surfaces. Similar technology we've seen in bullet trains use Maglev, which requires billions of dollars to be invested in tracks that contain sensors and electronics along every section of the track. Installing the infrastructure using Arx Pax technology would consist of laying down tracks using the right conductive material but without all of the expensive electronics. In the US, a company testing out a Maglev system in San Diego has cost about $750K per meter of test track. Arx Pax estimates its technology would only cost $10K per meter of track.
Arx Pax is able to achieve these advantages by using what it calls “magnetic field architecture,” which focuses the electromagnetic energy. Not only can the engine levitate on top of passive material, it can also move in multiple directions. Maglev technology needs stay on a set of tracks to maintain balance.
Henderson is still new to giving press interviews and tends to go off on tangents about all the ways the technology could be used. He sometimes stops in the middle of a sentence and starts talking excitedly on another topic.
One area he's particularly interesting in applying his technology is in the aerospace industry, where they're looking for more efficient takeoff systems. A huge amount of the payload in commercial aviation comes from fuel weight and most of the fuel is used up during takeoff. Arx Pax is hoping that its technology could be used to assist in that takeoff process and cut most of the fuel planes need during takeoff.
“If we can lighten the load by helping them takeoff, then the gas tanks get smaller, the wings get smaller, there's steeper flight takeoff, less noise. It goes on and on,” said Henderson. “There's this virtuous cycle of everything getting much, much more efficient.”
Henderson says the company has been in talks with many big companies about applying this technology. The problem is that they're slow moving. Up until this time, the company has been funded first on savings from the husband and wife co-founding team and then, once that money ran out, $1.5 million from friends and family. But Henderson has been working on this for quite a while.
“The Loma Prieta earthquake happened in October 1989. That's also around when Back to the Future Marty McFly shows up with his hoverboard in the films,” said Henderson. “Somehow, those two things combined in my head and I'm thinking about better ways to do things.”
The ideas started in his architecture grad school program where students were given the problem of building a school in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, which is on bay mud and subject to liquefaction. Not a good place to build anything.
“I'm an architect, not a scientist,” said Henderson. “The idea came from being able to levitate buildings out of earthquakes. All of the patents I was looking at were for moving objects. So I asked, why is that? If I can levitate a train, why not a house? We want to use the Hendo hoverboard and hover engines as a way to capture attention and bring attention to an important topic. Our responsibility is to help figure out a better way to build.”
