From AUVSI 2021: Alex Orozco, Vice President at Nippon Kayaku America, Speaks With ANN At XPONENTIAL 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia

ParaSafe is an emergency parachute system for drones. Its parent company, Nippon Kayaku, has been building automotive technology with a focus on safety systems, such as car airbags, for the past 29 years. Creating products for unmanned systems seemed like the next step for the company to embrace the future.

Nippon Kayaku created ParaSafe with the aim of protecting people. “We are a company that cares, we want to be able to offer high reliability products for society,” Orozco says.

“The system is designed around our automotive safety technology. It uses energetics, very much like an airbag inflator. There’s an ignition source, in the initiator, and that ignites a secondary stage which is the gas generating element,” Orozco explains. “A piston sends the parachute generating mechanism out and deploys, all of that takes place within one second.”

The installation will be able to adapt to many different platforms and a rough estimate on how long the system would take to install on a drone would be less than an hour.

“It is a one time use system,” Orozco shares, “once it’s deployed it can not be repacked. The trigger mechanism is one that we designed and built and is an integral part of the ParaSafe system. It has accelerometers, a gyro, and it has software coding integrated in the system to detect various levels of conditions for failure.

The next steps include ASTM testing, a process that lays out very vigorous steps of simulated failures. Nippon Kayaku is familiar with the very stringent and harsh testing procedures with their experience in automotive safety tests and is excited to bring their expertise to the unmanned community. In July of 2021, they acquired the company Aero Systems West, with the mission to build the world’s safest drone system.

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