1. 64 Michigan Alumnus | Summer 2014 | umalumni.com
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LOGANMCGRADY
I
n 2007, Danny Ellis and Tom Brady were
bored engineering interns at a lab in
Kalamazoo, Michigan. To pass the time,
the two talked about possible businesses
they could start.
“We were always sitting around the test
lab, not doing what we were supposed to—
joking about how we wanted to start a
company someday,” said Ellis, ’10, MSE’13.
“We had terrible ideas; we wanted to build
full-scaleairplanes,justthingsthatstartups
don’t do.”
That tendency toward ambition would
serve them well. Five years later, Ellis,
Brady, ’11, MSE’13, and seven other U-M
engineering graduates founded SkySpecs,
a company that builds unmanned aerial
vehicles. The purpose of these UAVs is to
inspect structures—such as bridges, wind
turbines, or sewers—while keeping human
feet on the ground. Not only is this safer
for the inspectors, it can save lives of the
public at large.
“We are able to do visual inspections
quicker and we are able to do them more
often,” Ellis said. “So you can actually
monitor the health of the system more
frequently, catch the failures sooner, and fix
them cheaper than if you had a catastrophic
failure.” An example of one such failure is
the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed in
2007. It had been inspected only once every
two years. More frequent, inexpensive
inspections could have saved lives.
It is this potential for increased safety
that makes SkySpecs shy away from the
term “drone.”
“You say ‘drone’ and people think armed,
military surveillance, and the perception of
that is very negative,” Ellis said. “There are a
lot of applications for these vehicles in the
world. What we are focusing on is the
intelligence of the device and removing the
need for a skilled pilot.”
The genesis of SkySpecs was Michigan
Autonomous Aerial Vehicles, a student
club founded by Ellis and several others
now working with the company. “We
decided we wanted to build a flying robot,”
he said. “So we put together a student
team, raised some money, and found a
competition to go to”—the International
Aerial Robotics Competition.
MAAV would continue for three years,
with the team gaining experience with
each successive competition. In 2009,
schools across the world were tasked with
building a flying robot that could take off
and navigate through a building, picking
up a USB drive in the process and replacing
it with a decoy. All the teams could do was
push “go.” The robot had to do the rest.
MAAV didn’t fulfill the mission, but it
got the closest of any team—earning a
first-place finish. That experience with
UAVs and success in competition gave the
U-M students the opportunity to take
their project to the business world. They
entered their first business competition
without a pitch two hours before the
deadline. They simply sent a video showing
what their robot could do. Again, the
team’s ambitious nature was on display.
“It was a very lofty pitch,” said Ellis.
“We said that we were going to conquer
the world and do every aspect of flying
robots there possibly is. We kind of got
laughed at. But we got a lot of positive
feedback as well.”
Withfundingfrombusinesscompetitions
and investors, SkySpecs set up shop in an
AnnArborwarehouse.Itisaveryutilitarian
space—work benches and toolboxes sit next
to laptops with computer code filling the
screen. Visually, it is a good representation
of how the SkySpecs team works—closely,
collaborating to solve the complex problems
of building vehicles that fly themselves.
“We look at this as our garage,” said
Ryan Morton, MSE’13, referring to the
space. Building an innovative system from
the ground up, the engineers treat each
other like brothers. “That’s my favorite
about working here, that everyone is really
smart ... except for a few people,” Anthony
Bonkoski, ’13, said with a laugh. “I’ve
worked at big companies before, and I
couldn’t connect at all with the people.
They wouldn’t have any experience. Here, I
get to wear a lot of different hats and talk
to people who know what they’re doing.”
A wind energy company, UpWind
Solutions, recently invited SkySpecs to
give a flight test. After demonstrating the
technology and what it could do for wind
turbines, SkySpecs signed a partnership
with the company, helping it move closer
to launching its product.
And although UAVs aren’t quite full-
scale airplanes, the alumni building this
technology have proved that lofty goals
aren’t always a bad thing.
Logan McGrady, ’13
Alumni Invention Takes Flight
Members of the
SkySpecs team
pose with their
prototype. From
left to right are
Aaron Silidker,
’07, Dan Ellis, ’10,
MSE’13,Tom
Brady, ’11,
MSE’13,
Anthony
Bonkoski, ’13,
Sam DeBruin,
’12, and Ryan
Morton, MSE’13.
Below:The
chassis for
SkySpecs’
unmanned aerial
vehicle.