A 17-year-old designed a cheaper, more efficient drone. The Department of Defense just awarded him $23,000 for it.

Cooper Taylor built a drone with an innovative tilt mechanism that eliminates the need for extra motors. He hopes to make drones cheaper.

• Cooper Taylor, 17, aims to revolutionize the drone industry with a new design.
• Taylor designed a motor-tilting mechanism to lower manufacturing cost and increase efficiency.
• His innovation won awards at science competitions adding up to $23,000.

Cooper Taylor is only 17 years old, but he's already trying to revolutionize the drone industry.

Taylor has spent the last year optimizing a type of drone that's being used more and more in agriculture, disaster relief, wildlife conservation, search-and-rescue efforts, and medical deliveries.

His design makes the drone more efficient, customizable, and less expensive to construct, he says. He's built six prototypes where he 3D-printed every piece of hardware, programmed the software, and even soldered the control circuit board.

He says building his drone cost one-fifth the price of buying a comparable machine, which sells for several thousand dollars.

Taylor told Business Insider that he hopes "if you're a first responder or a researcher or an everyday problem solver, you can have access to this type of drone."

His innovation won him an $8,000 scholarship in April at the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, funded by the Department of Defense. Then, on May 16, he received an even bigger scholarship of $15,000 from the US Navy, which he won after presenting his research at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair.

"Ultimately having people in STEM careers is a matter of national security," Winnie Boyle, the senior director of competitions at the National Science Teaching Association, which administers JSHS, told BI.

Even though most students who compete won't end up working in the military, she added, "we as the community will still benefit from the research that they're doing."

A drone that blends plane and helicopter

It all started when Taylor's little sister got a drone, and he was disappointed to see that it could only fly for about 30 minutes before running out of power.

He did some research and found that a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drone would last longer. This type of drone combines the multi-rotor helicopter style with the fixed wings of an airplane, making it extremely versatile. It lifts off as a helicopter, then transitions into plane mode. That way it can fly further than rotors alone could take it, which was the drawback to Taylor's sister's drone. Unlike a plane-style drone, though, it doesn't need a runway and it can hover with its helicopter rotors.

The problem is that VTOL drones are very expensive. As Taylor learned more about them, though, he realized he could improve a key inefficiency and maybe drastically reduce their cost.

VTOL drones use helicopter-style rotors to lift off straight from the ground, but once airborne, the motors running those rotors turn off and the drone switches to a plane-style motor to travel horizontally.

Motors are some of the most expensive parts of a drone, Taylor said, so having some motors sit idle during flight is "a big waste of cost and a big waste of energy."

He wanted to solve this problem by designing a motor that could start out helicopter-style for liftoff, then tilt back to become an airplane-style motor.

That's not a new concept. Aerospace companies have tinkered with tilting rotors for decades, according to David Handelman, a senior roboticist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

However, Taylor designed his rotor-tilting drone to be completely 3D-printed and completely modular. A user can pop the tail and wings out of their sockets and replace them with any custom appendages. Similarly, a port for cameras or scientific instruments leaves room for customization.

The cost savings come from the fact that his drone uses fewer motors, but the modular nature means users could upgrade or replace parts of the drone for a lower cost than buying a whole new drone.

Handelman, who mentored the high schooler, told BI in an email that Taylor's drone "could appeal to users who need a versatile platform but can't afford large or complex systems."

If you crash at first, try, try again

Taylor spent an entire summer solving this VTOL problem.

"It was a wonderful summer, really focused," Taylor said. "I'd wake up, I'd go into my basement, I'd work on the drone, I'd look outside, and it's 12 a.m."

When he hit a barrier in his knowledge of coding, design, or circuitry, he would look for advice in online forums or take a relevant course on the website Udemy.

His first three prototypes crashed. One of them soared 50 feet up and then face planted.

"That sort of hurt. That's a few hundred hours right there," Taylor said.

Each flight and crash revealed a problem he needed to fix until, finally, the fourth drone flew and touched down in one piece.

"I actually love doing this," Taylor said. "It's so much fun for me."

Taylor's latest prototype weighs about 6 pounds with a wingspan a little over 4 feet. He's flown it for up to 15 minutes at a time, but he has calculated that at the rate it uses power it should last for 105 minutes cruising at 45 mph. He doesn't want to push those limits just yet though.

"Cooper brought both curiosity and discipline to the project, working at a level I usually see in strong college students," Handelman said. "The fact that he got the aircraft flying is a testament to his persistence, creativity, and problem-solving ability."

Now Taylor is building his seventh iteration of the drone. Eventually, he wants to make it small enough to remove the wings and fit it in a backpack.

This summer, though, the high schooler says he'll be working on a different drone project through a program with the Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab at MIT.