The consultancy company, founded by Mike Gascoyne, who worked in senior management and at Technical Director level in Formula 1 for over 25 years, unveiled its fully functional technology demonstrator at the eVTOL Insights London Conference today (Wednesday 19 April).
It promises to bring a fresh viewpoint for developing the latest aerospace technology by applying Formula 1 development philosophies and mindsets to the cargo eVTOL UAV market.
MGI has been developing cargo eVTOL technologies for the past year and has resulted in its Mosquito autonomous technology demonstrators.
The solution focuses on a configurable design with 2 variants, the first is a tilt rotor configuration with 2 rotors on each corner capable of tilting from 45 degrees forward to 45 degrees rearward.
The second has 8 rotors with direct drive motors distributed across 4 wings, all of which use MGI’s proprietary tilt mechanism to control pitch and roll.
It can take off vertically and fully transition to winged flight for long distance missions.
MGI says the modular approach, where wings and rotors can be configured according to the mission profile, allows for scalable common platforms using common battery modules.
The platform concept has been designed to be scaled-up efficiently to payload capable vehicles carrying up to 500kg.
Gascoyne says, “We believe that developing sustainable electric aviation vehicles combined with our unique expertise and experience from Formula 1 of lightweight hybrid composite vehicles is the future of the transport industry and will ease the strain on current methods whilst decarbonising multiple sectors. We are very happy to have a fully working demonstrator vehicle that has passed all our tests to date including fully transitioning from vertical to horizontal flight. We’re excited to see where our development journey takes us and look forward to solving the unique and novel challenges the industry presents us with.”