FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – March 30, 2023

Herewith, we present our full catalog of folding helmets. Each of the helmet variations will fold in a particular configuration and will be produced with different number of slats, shell thickness and material types based on the use cases:

The Vanguard option is where we would include Arduino sensors, battery pack and other electronic PCBs to monitor well-being, safety and integrate with IoT gateways. This will be utilized in military, industrial settings as well as in residential and nursing homes to procure data from the embedded sensors to have real time and predictive capabilities for different use cases.

Based on our meetings @ Arduino day 2023  this past Saturday, we will be actively engaging the US team of Arduino to add sensor capabilities. This will be our first foray to include smart and connected features in our products:

• The Armadillo will have the Nicla Sense ME boards for environmental and wellbeing monitoring,
• The Hercules will also include two Nicla Vision boards for industrial and military operations, and in future the Nicla Speech board to provide for an AI basis for managing operating conditions using tinyML, and
• The Athena will be our first foray into fashion apparel merchandising and the gaming industry, an opportunity that happened during the mHUB Hardtech summit last week.

Future versions of our helmets will also include Visors with potential Augmented reality displays, bone conducting headphones so that you are aware of ambient noise and other needs for different types of use cases that we have catalogued in our Manifesto of the helmet.

Since we have a lot of variations, the goal of our design and engineering process is to build a complete parametric model where the individual variables govern the outcome and can be produced by an almost automated design process. I call this Outcome Based Modeling and have been following this since the beginning of my career when we used to build models for CAE/Simulation by creating what we called macros in Ansys and STAR-CCM. This also reduces the churn in rote manual work for designing components and adds an intelligent basis for engineering – what we call physmatics, that which is rooted in physics and mathematics.

For engineering helmets that are safe, we will be following compliance standards for the different use cases, and also working with Markforged to 3D print them. We will utilize their continuous fiber Additive Manufacturing process from their Digital Forge technologies to reinforce the helmet with Carbon Fiber, Kevlar and Fiber glass to make them safer.

Beyond producing helmets that are safe, it is also our intention downstream to utilize sensor data to enable better predictions, detections, and real time impact situations (using RFIDs) so that we can deem the helmets as unusable if there is a compromise to the structural integrity. We call this actionable intelligence and have details for this, our design methodology and physmatics on our website. For this we will be utilizing our multi-modal inference engine called the TAU Codex Orchestrator to analyze data from different streams.

Special thanks to Tyler Grudowski for having shepherded the design process from its onset by migrating the concept from Autodesk Fusion 360 to Solid Works and continuing with the customization and the parametric modeling considerations. We welcome Jim Shaw (simulations and testing) and Jeff Wernette (Vanguard design) to our team and look forward to working with them to transform the traditional helmet industry to its place in Industry 4.0.

Let’s band up and trip the light fantastic.

NITIN UCHIL Founder, CEO & Technical
nitin.uchil@numorpho.com