I walk past Eddie’s room in Baker House, our MIT dorm overlooking the Charles River, pretty much every day. Sometimes the door is open, and he’s seated at his desk in front of 5 or so computer monitors. I often wonder what he could be doing that requires so many monitors. I’ve come to learn that he could maybe use a few more.

Eddie Obropta is a researcher and an entrepreneur, an athlete and a learner. He is a PhD candidate in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, and plays ice hockey for the AeroAstro “Blackbirds,” named for the Lockheed SR-71 spy plane of Call of Duty fame. He has a young face and excitable personality. When animated, he will run his hands through his hair, leaving an Alfalfa-like cowlick in the middle of his dark amber hair.

But Eddie’s youthful appearance masks his impressive entrepreneurial experience. By the time he graduated MIT in 2013 with a bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering, he already had co-founded three companies. The first of these was RompApparel, a retail store in his native New Jersey that he started with his sister in 2006. His parents did screen printing, so Eddie was around clothes and textiles from a young age. He entertained the prospect of studying Materials Science and Engineering to further explore the properties of textiles, but went instead with Aerospace Engineering because it “seemed sweet. Why not?”

Still, he maintained an interest in fabrics, doing research in sports performance wear at Loughborough University in England. This was at the outset of the University’s relationship with MIT, which has grown significantly since then. Upon his return, Eddie became an early founding member of Sports Technology Education at MIT (STE@M), now called the MIT Sports Technology Research Group, a lab dedicated to developing cutting-edge sports technologies.

One of the other MIT students who had been at Loughborough with Eddie approached him with a business idea to build a better dress shirt after he heard that Eddie had started a clothing store. They ended up starting what is now called Ministry of Supply, which Eddie described as a “combination of Nike and business wear.” When the other co-founders, all older than Eddie, graduated, Eddie chose to stay at school and do research.

Five years later, and he’s remained in the same lab, the MIT Man Vehicle Lab (MVL), working on space clothes (space suits if you want to get technical). The lab has been working on the next generation of space suits that will be utilized in the Mars missions that are hopefully to come (Newman 2012). Current spacesuits are too large and cumbersome for use for extra vehicular activities, such as exploring planet surfaces outside of any ship or rover (Obropta, 2016). It’s difficult to bend over in the gas-pressurized suits, never mind hiking over rocky terrain. Such suits just aren’t practical for actual exploration, conducting scientific experiments and collecting samples on other worlds.

The MVL’s BioSuit™ concept, which aims for a “second skin” design, utilizes shape memory alloys—metals that assume their “remembered” shape at a set temperature (Newman, 2012). This property allows the suit to be loose for donning and doffing, and then it can be shrunk to be skin-tight by passing a current through the metal (think shrink wrap). Pressurizing the suit mechanically replaces the gas and makes the suit much more maneuverable. While the concept affords a lower-profile, more mobile suit with simplified life support systems, it also presents challenges.

Extend your arm and look at your elbow. Then bend your arm fully. Repeat this with a hand over your elbow to feel your skin. It’s amazing how perfectly your skin stretches as needed, in just the right places. The BioSuit™ needs to mimic these properties exactly, in order to maintain counter pressure to the astronaut without inhibiting movement (Obropta, 2016). Eddie adapted a technique from materials testing called digital image correlation to measure skin deformation. The process consists of applying a random pattern of dots to a surface, then using multiple cameras to map the movement of the dots and establish the rates of expansion and contraction in different areas (Obropta, 2016). This data informs the design of the suit to more closely mirror astronaut’s skin at the elbow.

The BioSuit™ was being spearheaded by Professor Dava Newman, but now that she is on temporary leave from MVL as the Deputy Administrator of NASA, MIT professor and former astronaut Jeff Hoffman is leading the development. Even if Newman was still at MIT, Eddie himself might not be around much longer. He’s co-founded yet another startup and this could be the one, he thinks.

The current business venture is called Raptor Maps. Eddie and fellow MIT PhD candidates Nikhil Vadhavkar and Forrest Meyen won MIT’s Entrepreneurship Competition this past year. Eddie’s previous three entries didn’t make it past the first round. This year, however, they took home the $100,000 first prize for developing an analytics platform for drones to survey crops and more effectively identify areas being affected by bugs and disease (“Drone Tech,” 2015). While satellites are too far away to provide helpful images of the crops, the current method of crop surveillance, walking, is too slow for most farmers to see even a percentage of their acreage all growing season (“Drone Tech,” 2015).

Unmanned aircraft are the perfect compromise: close enough to provide useful images and far more efficient than most other means of crop evaluation. Agriculture is the largest industry on Earth (World Wildlife Fund 2016), and an estimated 40% of all crops are destroyed each year by disease and pests (BBC News, 2011). By identifying such issues before they can spread, Raptor Maps aims to improve crop yields worldwide. And they’re starting now. The $100K prize has allowed them to start building multiple drones to establish a foothold in the market (Obropta, 2016). This past summer, they surveyed 1000 acres as a kind of proof-of-concept and did work for the US Geological Survey imaging shoreline erosion on Cape Cod. They’ve secured a grant from the Maine government for this summer (Obropta, 2016). The company is progressing to the point that Eddie is considering pursuing the company full time.

His role at Raptor Maps is working on the system architecture for the software. The drones collect data that must be uploaded to the cloud in a manner that it can be quickly queried. Without having taken many computer science classes at MIT, Eddie’s built much of the platform himself, and is now coordinating other people’s coding efforts as well. He didn’t know much about agriculture either, but he says MIT prepared him well in “learning how to learn,” picking things up on the go, so that wasn’t a big problem either.

Even with Raptor Maps picking up steam, Eddie still has his eye on multiple industries, formulating potential start-ups. The industry he’s most closely monitoring? Textiles, of course. He believes fully automated manufacturing of clothes will spark a revolution in the business. The fact that he is still contemplating such projections with the multitude of other projects on his plate makes the jumble of monitors in his room seem almost necessary.

 

Works Cited

BBC News. (2011, November). “Plant pests: The biggest threats to food security?” Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15623490

“Drone Tech Startup Raptor Maps Wins MIT Entrepreneurship Competition, $100K Prize.” DRONELIFE. (2015, May 14). Retrieved from http://dronelife.com/2015/05/14/drone-tech-startup-raptor-maps-wins-mit-entrepreneurship-competition-100k-prize/.

Newman, Dava. (2012, Winter). Building the Future Spacesuit. Ask Magazine, (45), 37–40. http://appel.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/04/617047main_45s_building_future_spacesuit.pdf

Obropta, Eddie. (2016, March). Personal Interview.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF). “Sustainable Agriculture: Overview.” (2016). Retrieved March 16, 2016, from http://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/sustainable-agriculture