The Tulsa Hub for Equitable and Trustworthy Autonomy (THETA) was awarded $51 million by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) to explore advanced manufacturing for autonomous systems finding their way into a range of use cases such as unmanned flight, autonomous vehicles, robots and more.
“With this money we are making the case that not only can we onshore a lot of that manufacturing back here, but that Tulsa, Okla., is the shore. It is the place, and the epicenter for this new manufacturing, this new development deployment of these technologies,” said Jennifer Hankins, managing director of Tulsa Innovation Labs (TIL), the umbrella organization for THETA.
TIL was selected earlier this month as one of 12 regional innovation hubs, with the idea of accelerating growth across a number of technology innovation areas like artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing or energy. The sites are known as Tech Hubs. In Oklahoma, the Tech Hub project will be directed toward autonomous systems and the advanced manufacturing needed to develop these systems.
Tulsa Innovation Labs will apply the funding toward six projects to advance this level of new manufacturing development. One of those, the Tulsa Advanced Research and Manufacturing Acceleration Coalition (TARMAC) — a demonstration hub of small to mid-size manufacturers — will “pivot” into a new autonomous systems sector “and allow them to demonstrate how to manufacture those critical components at scale,” Hankins said.
The initiative will also explore job creation in advanced manufacturing. The region is already a leader in aerospace maintenance.
“Aerospace is in our blood. Manufacturing is in our blood. We need more of that. So creating more on-the-job training opportunities so that folks can get their credentials faster, while working,” she said.
Growing advanced manufacturing in areas like autonomy is needed in the United States, said Jennifer Jacobs Dungs, global head of mobility at EIT InnoEnergy.
“We don’t want to just be the users of all this technology that’s coming. We want to benefit from the job creation,” Dungs said during remarks at the CoMotion Miami conference in May. Technology innovations, she said, shouldn’t just come from Asia — but from this country as well.
“If we’re just users of that [technology], but we lost all the jobs, we lost all the economy, then we kind of missed a big opportunity,” Dungs said.
TIL has a partnership with Osage LLC, the economic development arm of the Osage Nation, in a project known as Skyway Range, where Tech Hubs will further develop the autonomous drone testing capabilities. Skyway Range is the nation’s most ambitious vision for a beyond-the-line-of-sight drone testing corridor, Hankins said. Its testing area includes 114 nautical miles near the Tulsa International Airport — an “unheard of” proximity, she said, adding: “It’s very difficult, and very special.”
“In Tech Hubs we’re going to supercharge the testing capabilities, the back-end technological capabilities of our drone corridor,” she said.