Tag Archives: Charles Bombardier

This futuristic airport-escalator can perform your security check as you stand on it

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We’ve all gone through that arduous, annoying process of passing through security check at the airport. It’s honestly a race against the clock, and against cluelessness. Do you take your belt off? Shoes? Okay, how do I time it perfectly so my suitcase gets scanned at the same time I get my body-scan done? Is that man trying to pick up my bag? The process, as streamlined as airports have tried to make it, is stressful, and the longer the line, the more the impatience. Charles Bombardier and Ashish Thulkar, however, believe they may have an answer to this problem.

Meet the Aerochk. It’s practically a security-checking kiosk and an escalator rolled into one. Getting yourself checked is simple. The escalator has two conveyor belts on each side. One for your passport, another for your bags. Keep your stuff ready and board the escalator. Your passport and luggage travels alongside you, and right at the end, you (and your stuff) pass through a security-booth that performs a scan on you. Multiple sensors scan your weight, your body, and your face to offset the manual scanning process done by humans. Simultaneously, the passport conveyor does a scan of your passport to match your details with you as a person, while also performing a background check to make sure your document is valid, and that you’re eligible for travel. The luggage conveyor also simultaneously scans your bags for any prohibited items, using a wide variety of sensors and cameras, spanning X-Ray, thermal imaging, spetrometric scanning, and even electronic noses like the Cumulus sensor. All these sensors tag your luggage as well as your passport to you as the individual, streamlining the entire process so that you don’t have to wait in line, moving inch by inch. Just stand on the Aerochk and it guides you through the entire security check procedure without you having to move a muscle. Once you’re out, you’re free to collect your luggage, validated passport, and your flight ticket. Easy peasy!

Designers: Charles Bombardier & Ashish Thulkar (Imaginactive)

Ambular uses the sky to provide swift medical emergency response in crowded cities

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Obviously executing an airlift in cities isn’t particularly feasible. You’ve got buildings, cars, pedestrians, telephone wires, traffic lights, along with a dozen other complications. Helicopters, no matter how small, can’t do the job in crowded cities, and regular ambulances end up bearing the brunt of congested roads and traffic. In swoops (quite literally) the Ambular, an eVTOL designed to provide medical airlifts in cities. Ambular can take off and land without needing a helipad, and can transport patients to medical centers safely, via air.

Ambular comes with six propellers (three on each side) that help it take off and land vertically as well as travel through the air. Given that Ambular will work in crowded cities, it makes sense that the propellers come with pretty strong guards around them, just in case they hit or snag something and get damaged. Each propeller is capable of pushing out 20kW of power, giving the Ambular the ability to carry patients up to 250lb for as long as 15 nautical miles.

Ambular’s small, city-friendly size comes from the fact that it lacks a cockpit. Patients are loaded into Ambular’s cabin, and an autonomous piloting system transports them to the hospital. The absence of a pilot, and of piloting controls allows Ambular to operate in relatively small real estate (as compared to helicopters, with a wing-to-wing span of approximately 20 feet.

Designers: Charles Bombardier and Martin Rico for Imaginactive

The Ascent Pod literally takes skydiving to the next level!

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The year was 2012 and Felix Baumgartner was all ready to make history. He climbed into the Red Bull Stratos, a helium balloon that would carry him to a dizzying altitude of 39 kilometers, before he made a leap of faith, plummeting to earth in what would be the world’s highest sky-dive. Baumgartner’s entire journey to land lasted approximately ten whole minutes, in which he managed to break the sound barrier, setting a world record. Baumgartner’s entire jump was live-streamed on the internet, giving the world a taste of high-altitude skydiving… and that inspired Charles Bombardier and Ashish Thulkar to start imagining what the sport would look like if it ever took shape.

Behold the Ascent, a portable rocket pod designed as an entry level experience for potential space tourists and skydivers. “The base of the rocket pod houses turbine jets which provide extremely high power to weight ratio and allow the appropriate thrust required to propel the Ascent over 150 km/h up to altitudes of 15 000 feet”, says Bombardier, the man behind the idea of the Ascent. The Ascent’s fuselage comes with large glass windows, providing a stellar view of your surroundings as you ascend into the sky. Once the Ascent reaches maximum climb, it begins making its way down to earth. Riders can either skydive at 12000 feet, or ride the rocket pod back to earth, in what would be perhaps one of the most thrilling high-altitude experiences ever made for the public!

The Ascent is designed to be extremely lightweight when un-fueled, making it easy to transport on a trailer to the site of take-off. Designed to democratize stratospheric flight, the Ascent goes to the same altitude as a plane does, but makes the journey much more awe-striking in remarkable 360° visibility!

Designer: Ashish Thulkar and Charles Bombardier for Imaginactive

The Feuxzy drone fights forest fires with sonic waves

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Feuxzy makes a case for the use of drones in swift-action danger-scenarios where human life is much too precious. Designed to monitor park, woods, and forests, the Feuxzy is shaped like a saucer and comes built with chemical sensors, thermal sensors, thermal cameras and AI that help it detect forest fires. Also built into the Feuxzy is a sonic fire extinguisher that shoot beams of low-frequency bass sounds between 30 and 60 Hz to disrupt the air around the fire, sending pressure through the air molecules to remove the oxygen from it and causing the fire to die down. Built with as many as five of these sonic extinguishers, Feuxzy can travel right into the heart of forest fires, fighting the flames from all sides, rather than working just at the periphery, the way a human firefighter would do.

Feuxzy measures 20 inches in diameter and 12 inches thick. Its shell is made out of composites and its energy source comes from ion lithium batteries (or a fuel cell) that power an electric turbofan located at its center. It isn’t clear how these batteries will fare in high-temperature scenarios, but I’m sure there’s always a design or engineering fix that can help these conceptual drones become a fire-fighting reality. Feuxzy’s roles aren’t, however, limited to just fire-fighting. They can patrol these large expanses of land, monitoring the flora and fauna as well as working to track down missing people.

Designers: Martin Rico & Adolfo Esquivel (Imaginactive)

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This car-sized two-seater VTOL can take off and land directly in parking slots

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The Onyx is the result of a pretty basic demand. The future of flying cars is clearly the VTOL, or the vertical take-off and landing vehicle, and when they do become a norm, they’ll need to follow a set framework to fit into a world that was dominated for a century by four-wheeler cars. For instance, taking a VTOL to the nearest supermarket would mean having to park it in the same car-park as any regular car. That’s why the Onyx is designed the way it is… to provide that seamless transition from land-vehicles to flying-cars without necessarily needing a change in infrastructure.

The Onyx comes with a six-rotor set up, housing two rotor-units in front and four at the back (each rotor contains two propellers that rotate in opposite directions, making the Onyx have a total of 12 propellers). This arrangement gives the Onyx an overall rectangular layout, as opposed to a hexagon or square layout that would come from orienting the propellers radially or on the sides. The rectangular layout ensures the Onyx occupies the same amount of space as an SUV or a pickup, letting it comfortably fit into existing car parking spaces, and allowing conventional open parking lots to serve as docking/parking zones for VTOLs too.

Despite its large size, the Onyx is a two-person VTOL, with a single-piece glass hood that opens outwards, allowing passengers to embark and disembark from the sides, like a helicopter. This limitation is brought about, in part, by the fact that the Onyx is entirely electric-powered. Interchangeable battery packs supply power to the 12 propellers that are designed to be power efficient while greatly reducing rotor noise, making the Onyx a non-polluting VTOL in more ways than one!

Designers: Charles Champagne & Jorge Ciprian (Imaginactive)

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The Transformer of Tractors

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Trakthor is a transforming tractor concept that’s all about changing scale. Utilizing the latest in electric motors and materials, it can disassemble itself into smaller, more maneuverable units, and then reassemble itself into a bigger unit capable of pulling heavier things… all without any help from humans!

The chassis is designed to allow each wheel unlatch and roll around obstacles independently. These autonomous units allow the Trakthor to traverse varying terrains and complete separate tasks. In this mode, gyroscopic motors are activated to maintain balance.

In mode #2, Trakthor can split in two vehicles, similar in shape to a motorcycle. Slightly less maneuverable than individual units, but double the power! As technology progresses, a wide range of attachments and features for various farming activities would be made available. For example, a subsystem dedicated to tree removal or others for plowing and sowing seeds.

Designer: Ashish Thulkar & Charles Bombardier

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VIP Urban Railways

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Charles Bombardier developed this private people mover after reading Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged. In it, the heroine used her family’s railroad track to travel from city to city. That made him wonder if “business trains” could one day become a reality. Would it be possible to sell them like business jets? That’s the idea behind the Randvu!

It’s designed to cut back on commuting times for 9-5ers who subscribe to the system (but own private “cars”) by utilizing existing and new rail tracks. Each car operates independently and can hop on or off the tracks to skip gridlock. Subscribers can go directly from their office door to their dwelling without getting stuck in traffic all while sitting in a posh retro-modern interior with lush couches, mahogany furniture, and an on-board bar. Interiors can also be custom designed according to the owner’s specifications.

Designers: Charles Bombardier and Martín Rico

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Amazon meets drone meets hyperloop!

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Honestly, if there were any company meddling with innovative consignment delivery, it would probably be Amazon. Known to be a company that isn’t shy to push boundaries, they’ve got their fingers in every domain possible. The final frontier? Transportation! The Iris was developed as a concept to help Amazon get their deliveries done a whole lot faster.

These massive electric trains would carry Amazon cargo via rail to different parts of the country. However, upon reaching a destination, last-mile delivery of packages would be made via drones that dock inside the top of the train. Iris aims at using current infrastructure like railroads as their mode of operations, and hopefully becoming effective enough to democratize itself and offer its services to the likes of FedEx and UPS. The concept aims to tackle the entire delivery chain by creating one single solution that takes care of the entire A to Z (Amazon joke!) of deliveries. Hey, as long as I get same-day deliveries!

Designers: Martin Rico & Charles Bombardier (Imaginactive).

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