What if three months became three weeks?
An accelerated UAV redesign run against a government solicitation deadline.
The What If
What if the slow part of hardware development is not the physics, but everything around it?
What made it hard
A government solicitation set the deadline. A concept-to-flight cycle of this kind normally runs about three months, and the calendar did not have three months in it.
What we tried
A full redesign pass compressing the usual cycle: AI-assisted research, computational notebooks, rapid material trade studies, supplier qualification, analysis, prototyping, and flight testing, run in parallel rather than in sequence.
What reality said
Most of the traditional schedule is handoffs and waiting rather than work. Compressing the research and trade-study phases moved the whole critical path.
The decision
GO. The aircraft flew inside the window.
Who worked on it
- Tyler Stevens, Ph.D.Mechanical & Product Engineering
Sources: Tyler Stevens CV, supplied by client.
Try yours.
You don’t need to know whether the answer is software, hardware, or a process change. That’s the part we figure out.
What’s the question you keep coming back to?
We’ll tell you quickly whether it sounds like an invent.me problem.