A team of rLoop members stormed the finals and are taking home the “Hyperloop Design, Drama, and Excitement Award” at Dubai’s ‘Build Earth Live’ Competition.
The rLoop team, a multidisciplinary group of designers, engineers, and other professionals, has one vision: To bring hyperloop technology into the real world.
The 48 hour competition pitted an assortment of renowned Architecture, Transportation, and Engineering firms, as well as University teams in a race against time. The goal? To design an effective Hyperloop infrastructure and route connecting three terminals – Dubai International Airport, Fujairah International Airport on the Gulf of Oman, and Jebel Ali Al Maktoum International Airport.
The rLoop route would shorten travel times from over 2 hours to just 10 minutes via the Hyperloop. The rLoop team was the only team that was neither corporate nor university, being the world’s first crowdsourced engineering team. A panel of expert judges had chosen 65 teams to compete in the semi-finals from an initial pool of over 250 entrants.
The panel includes specialists from architecture, construction, and the Hyperloop, representatives from local and international government entities, and representatives of government and private-sector institutions in Dubai and the UAE, the US, and the UK. The rLoop team for this competition included professionals from around the globe including Canada, the United States, Nigeria, the UK, Romania, and Hong Kong. Brent Lessard, Project Manager at rLoop, had this to say about the award:
“It is a tremendous honour to be recognized for our work, and this award is further affirmation of our crowdsourced and open source model. Our multidisciplinary and globally distributed team have come together to collaborate on the grand challenges of the future, and the work we’ve produced on a compressed timeline is demonstrative of the capabilities of our passionate team.”
Breanna Faye, who led the architectural design and planning for the competition, had this to say about the station design: “Our design for the BuildEarthLive competition expanded beyond the typical ‘station’ and conceptualized how an entire Hyperloop ecosystem could manifest at a regional scale.
Focusing on a modular system that would connect to and set the precedent for the globally interconnected network of Hyperloop stations and routes. The project presents Dubai as the first regional Hyperloop hub, a leader in Smart Cities development and urban innovation, and provides a space for technological advances in mass transit to build from new infrastructures.”
The success of a crowdsourced engineering team over the internet in Dubai marks the increasing maturity of a new paradigm. rLoop is showing that research, development, and technology can be designed and created in an entirely new way, and the result is the design award victory as seen in Dubai.
rLoop is also a finalist in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Design competition, being the only non-student team to advance in the competition to be held in January of 2017. Because rLoop is entirely crowdsourced, they welcome all skillsets to join their world class team of professionals. Source and images Courtesy of rLoop.
