November 27, 2023
2023 INNOVATORS ISSUE
2023 Innovator: Innovations chief Cherepinsky leads Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter research, technology
Igor Cherepinsky leads Sikorsky’s efforts to incorporate autonomous flight technology in its helicopters.
By Harriet Jones
Igor Cherepinsky Bio Box
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Igor Cherepinsky learned to fly when he was 16 years old.
“It’s really cool up there,” he says. “Just the whole feeling of being able to take off like a bird and go anywhere you want.”
He would pair his passion for the freedom of flying with the rigorous discipline of engineering, harnessing them both in a career that’s focused on keeping pilots safer and giving them the controls they need to fly dangerous missions.
Cherepinsky immigrated to the U.S. with his family from the Soviet Union when he was a teenager. They ended up in Brooklyn, where he finished high school and moved on to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. It was there he first encountered a recruiter from Sikorsky.
The connection stayed with him, and he got hired straight out of graduate school into the helicopter maker as a flight-controls engineer on the company’s iconic Black Hawk.
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He has spent the rest of his career there, rising from an engineer to now the director of Sikorsky Innovations, tasked with “solving the toughest problems in vertical flight by introducing new technologies, processes and products.”
Autonomous focus
It was through Sikorsky that Cherepinsky first got to meet military pilots who fly medical evacuation missions in combat zones, and learned what they go through to save lives.
“That was really how my involvement in autonomy started – it was trying to see if we can make some of these really tough missions a little bit easier,” he said.
Autonomous flight is Cherepinsky’s specialty — figuring out how to hand over control of some of the most technically difficult aspects of flight to the machine itself.
Since he was hired in 1998, that has involved developing an advanced autopilot and flight director that’s now standard on the Black Hawk, and the fly-by-wire system that puts a computer in between the pilot and direct control of the aircraft.
The next step was development of a software system called the Autonomy Mission Manager, and work on the S-76 Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (with the friendly acronym SARA) — a development and demonstration technology for the company’s innovations in autonomous flight.
It was this aircraft in 2016 that flew the 30 miles from Sikorsky’s Stratford headquarters to an airstrip in Plainville controlled solely by a tablet. The pilot was able to click and drag to replan what the helicopter was doing — never touching the cockpit controls.
That work was the first phase of a project Cherepinsky and his team undertook in collaboration with the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The ALIAS — Aircrew Labor In-cockpit Automation System — was supported by Sikorsky’s MATRIX autonomy technology.
In November 2022, the DARPA project successfully demonstrated how a Black Hawk helicopter flying autonomously — with no pilots on board — could complete a cargo resupply mission and rescue operation.
In the staged “mission” carried out and filmed at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, the unmanned aircraft flew more than 80 miles carrying 400 units of blood and flying, at times, as low as 200 feet.
It then resupplied troops with an external load. Mid-mission, a ground operator — again armed only with a tablet — took over control of the aircraft, and re-routed it to evacuate a casualty.
Cherepinsky says one of the big challenges in developing that capability was building a way to communicate with the machine.
“We actually built a language and a user interface where almost anyone can convey what the mission really is in almost a human-like exchange,” he said. “Based on that, the machine figures out a plan and presents a plan to you and says, ‘here’s what I’m going to go do.’”
It’s then up to the pilot to approve the plan, edit it, or tell the machine to try again.
Human and machine
While society is slowly getting used to the idea of self-driving cars, autonomous flight might seem a step too far to many of us.
“We humans are terrible at giving up control,” said Cherepinsky. “We always think we can do a better job than we actually can in a lot of cases.”
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Instead, he is a firm believer in human and machine working together.
“It’s a healthy tension between, what does a human do well, versus what does a machine do well,” he says.
To explain it in terms most of us can understand, he takes the example of anti-lock brakes, something we all now take for granted.
“That’s your perfect example of where the human is the mission commander,” according to Cherepinsky. “So we say, ‘I want to stop.’ A machine can’t figure that out — that’s hard. But once you decide you want to stop, how to stop — that’s the realm of math and physics. That’s executed by computers way better than any human ever can.”
Since 2010, his autonomy work has been carried out as part of the Sikorsky Innovations group. The idea behind the group’s formation was to narrow down research and development efforts to a manageable number of highly relevant projects and invest heavily in them.
Cherepinsky says the central question they try to answer is, “what will transform vertical flight?” The first research pillars chosen for Innovations were autonomy, speed and intelligence.
Back then, his boss at Innovations was Chris Van Buiten, the founding director of the new unit. Van Buiten says he knew from the start of their work together that Cherepinsky was something special.
“I feel blessed that during my life, I’ve worked with a lot of brilliant people, but he is by far the smartest,” Van Buiten said.
Van Buiten says what’s different about Cherepinsky is his ability to both be an expert in the highly technical details, and also see the bigger picture.
“Just talking to him, you quickly understood that he was much more than a flight-controls expert,” he said. “His technical expertise was very broad, whether it was aerodynamics or structures or electronics, electrical systems — and then he also had a really savvy business side to him.”
Building the team at Innovations was an interesting exercise. At any one time, the unit has about 100 dedicated team members, with other Sikorsky staff being assigned temporarily. That can mean the unit fields as many as 400 experts.
Van Buiten says the key skill is being self-starting.
“Self-propelled people,” he said. “You give them a very general direction and help them with the resources, and they’ll just go and attack and make it their own, and have the courage to try and the courage to fail.”
Cherepinsky, he says, “has that in spades. His work ethic is just enormous.”
Van Buiten says Cherepinsky also intuitively understands how to get the best out of the engineers he’s working with.
“One of the parts of the job I always enjoyed,” says Van Buiten, “super-brilliant people may not always be the easiest to work with, and the normal systems and measurements don’t value them appropriately. They prefer working at 2 in the morning (rather) than showing up at 8 a.m. You know — they’re just different.”
Cherepinsky, he says, “knows how to leverage that.”
In May 2020, Cherepinsky became director of Sikorsky Innovations.
Innovation, with a side of pizza
So, now that he is in charge of that room of brilliant, self-starting, and occasionally difficult people, what is Cherepinsky’s recipe for innovation?
“There is no process,” he says. “Anytime you try to apply process to innovation you end up stifling creativity. I hate using words like controlled chaos, but there is a little bit of that.”
And in our work-from-home world, he’s a big proponent of his team getting some serious face time.
“Nothing beats an in-room, in-person design session for three, four hours, with a healthy dose of pizza thrown in the middle,” he says.
Cherepinsky also wants a variety of voices, backgrounds and skills in the room.
“The more diverse a team is, the better the outcomes,” he said.
He also works closely with some humans who have occasionally awkward opinions about his work — the pilots.
“Pilots are not shy — trust me,” he says. Some, he says, are resistant to the idea of autonomous flight. Others are excited to see what new gadgets and capabilities he can come up with.
Steve Schmidt, the chief engineer at Sikorsky, describes Cherepinsky — admiringly — as a “tinkerer.”
“He can go into his garage, into our labs, and he builds what he invents himself,” says Schmidt. “He loves to create, all the way down to the circuit boards, with his own hands, and that tinkering ability really is what brings to life our next products.”
It’s also translated into a lot of intellectual property for the helicopter maker, which is owned by Lockheed Martin — the Maryland-based defense giant that earned nearly $66 billion in revenue in 2022.
The third floor of the engineering building at Sikorsky’s Stratford headquarters includes a wall honoring patents awarded to employees.
“Once you get to a certain number of patents, you get a large picture on that wall,” said Schmidt. “The first picture is Igor Sikorsky’s.” After that, he says, you can count on one hand the number of pictures, but Cherepinsky’s is one.
“He has over 45 patents and a bunch more pending,” Schmidt said.
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Electric flight
Now that he’s stepped up to the director’s chair at Sikorsky Innovations, Cherepinsky’s remit is much wider than autonomous flight.
And he says Innovations itself, more than a decade into its mission, has also reached a point where the company’s needs are changing.
Of the department’s original three pillars, the innovations in speed are transitioning into production. Many of the improvements in diagnostics or intelligence are also now out in the real world, just as with some of the advances in autonomy.
Because it’s such a complex challenge, autonomy is likely to remain at the forefront of research for the foreseeable future.
Cherepinsky says they are also continuing work on perception, building more robust sensors that can help pilots deal with low-visibility conditions — essential for Coast Guard rescue missions, or conditions over oil rigs.
Igor Cherepinsky said Sikorsky engineers are developing more robust sensors that can help pilots deal with low-visibility conditions — essential for Coast Guard rescue missions, or conditions over oil rigs.
One of the new pillars taking center stage is hybrid electric flight.
Earlier this year, Sikorsky announced the development of a hybrid-electric demonstrator project dubbed HEX, a fully-autonomous, hybrid-electric, vertical takeoff and landing prototype.
Cherepinsky sees this focus partly as a response to climate change, but also an effort to cut maintenance and other costs — with direct electric drive, there are fewer mechanical components, and also less waste.
“It actually opens up a design space,” he said. “You see the explosion of different-looking aircraft today because of electric flight. Our demonstrator is not going to look like a helicopter.”
The company plans to release pictures of the project toward the end of this year, and hopes to have it in flight by 2026. It’s still a vertical flight machine, he says, “but it’s not a helicopter.”
It’s the latest way that Cherepinsky and his team can keep Sikorsky at the cutting edge of rotorcraft flight.
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