Kyle Cothern

What started as just two engineers and a dream to develop a vacuum tube network between cities grew into the most productive group at Hyperloop, with over 15 engineers working mechanical, manufacturing, tooling, and civil aspects of the wayside, as well as interfacing with the vehicle, propulsion and test groups, Hyperstructures defined engineering, release, and manufacturing processes company wide, and spearheaded major manufacturing efforts for the tube structure and vehicles. I strategically led these efforts alongside TJ, reporting to the CEO, and later CTO. My favorite part of working with Hyperstructures was mentoring new engineers who'd just graduated, and seeing them grow into formidable experts. It was amazing to work with such a rad group.

The Hyperloop Development Loop ( Dev Loop for short ) is a first of its kind vacuum transportation demonstrator designed to achieve speeds up to 700 mph. I was initially assigned the project and took it through the preliminary design phase, defining system requirements and metrics for the tube, propulsion system and vehicle, and designing the tubes, performing analysis and creating drawings and assembly models. I held a company wide design review for the tube system and brought everyone up to speed. I then kicked off tube manufacture with Ameron in San Luis Rio Colorado, inspected a pilot run of tubes with a newly trained metrology group. I transitioned to project management, organizing detailed design work and assigning roles for the remaining build to various engineering design and support groups. I continued to mentor and guide the team through the design process as we encountered issues, and transitioned to focusing on development of our manufacturing capability, in an effort to accelerate the schedule and provide a base for future systems hardware development.

In order to build the Dev Loop system and further advanced tooling to support customer system deployment, I pitched a development manufacturing facility to the CEO and CTO. I defined requirements for capability with the engineering team and worked with operations to lease a 104,000 sq ft cross dock warehouse. I worked with a tooling expert to source equipment (waterjets, saws, CNC Mills, weld tables, welders, etc) and then grew a team of experienced toolmakers, metrology professionals, welders and machine operators. The Lone Mountain facility proved invaluable to keeping the Dev Loop build on schedule, quickly turning around multiple issues with vendor supplied parts, and churning out thousands of parts for the various component assemblies of the tube and vehicle systems. I personally oversaw the shop and tracked progress with the engineering team during the ramp up and production phases of the build, and I was stoked to go from an empty warehouse to a well equipped shop and an expert tooling team with the confidence of the core engineering group to turn complex designs into hardware quickly.

My first role at SpaceX was designing ground support equipment for the Falcon 9 Rocket. I specifically worked on the droop tool ( the large aluminium frame on the right side of this picture ) and the launch mount at SLC-40, carrying out design, CAD, finite element analysis and generating drawings, as well as working with the tooling group during fabrication and following the equipment to the Cape to prove it out.

I worked extensively on the redesign of the Falcon 9 V1.1 Transport erector at Cape Canaveral. I modified the way the TE interfaces with the launch mount to decrease bending moment driven into the rocket, found a way to increase stiffness in the strongback despite tight geometric constraints in the hangar and on the pad, and redesigned the lift system to decrease costs and reduce risk in damaging the rocket when going over center. I also built toolchains while doing this work to allow other engineers to easily redesign these systems in the future. I performed the final shell model analysis on the lower strongback and it managed to survive a vehicle detonating on the pad a couple years later (which was exciting :D)

The transport erector and lift system at Vandenberg was the most challenging work I did at SpaceX. We designed the entire system from a clean sheet in 5 months, and built it in 3. I built a calculator that allowed us to optimize the geometry of the pad and lift system, built the top level CAD assembly, and performed Finite Element Analysis on the entire combined system through the various stages of lift. I then made drawing packages and followed the linkage weldment through on site manufacturing by the tooling group, and resolved issues with out of tolerance parts and interferences. I worked on the procedure for lifting the rocket and was on console for the first lift, providing technical support when we encountered an anomaly in the early lift. At the time, this was the largest operational rocket launch site in the world (it is now only eclipsed by the Falcon Heavy pad at SLC-39a, which was designed using the tools I developed)

CHARLI was the first full scale autonomous humanoid robot built in the US. It was a two year undergraduate project that I led my senior year in the RoMeLa Lab at Virginia Tech. It went on to win the robocup robot soccer competition the year following my graduation, and inspired the Darpa Robotics Challenge.

The Raphael robot hand was an undergraduate research project into low cost manipulators I worked on my sophomore and junior years in the RoMeLa Lab at Virginia Tech. It won the Compressed Air and Gas Institute's innovation award, and was built using control and sensing hardware donated for the project by National Instruments.

Swarf robotics is my small business focused on developing novel robotics actuators using low cost commercially available brushless motors. I've also run a lecture series at the Crashspace Hackerspace in Los Angeles through Swarf. Check out my website swarf.io for more info.

At Elarm I led mechanical efforts in developing a mesh sensor network for home user applications. I designed a series of enclosures and developed some embedded code, as well as PCBs to provide a lighting interface for the devices.

At Freefly, I designed, built and tested multiple drones and stabilization gimbals for use in the film industry. I also expanded the company's prototyping capability and worked on a few rapid turn special projects supporting filmmakers in the field.