About me
Fuelled by passion, I have a track record of being an out of the box thinker, developing both new theories and innovative designs.
Philosophy
Over the years I developed a philosophy that serves the best my passion for long term progress:
This set of principles is made to serve the idea of progress. While innovation focus on creating new designs to bring solutions to existing problems, progress focus first on creating new knowledge to push the boundary of what will ever be possible to achieve, sometimes unveiling unseen problems, sometimes leading to allegedly impossible designs.
My commitment to progress has been greatly influenced by the realization that modern innovation mostly falters for what is called making technological progress is often nothing more than building a sterile graveyard of facts, turning precious people’s time and resources to waste.
My long term goal is to transform engineering by creating a framework made to embrace the most exciting capability of the human mind : the art of navigating limitlessly between imagination and execution. This way, I aim to lay down the conditions for the advent of major new paradigms, paving the way for truly disruptive technologies.
I’m Estébane Saltapes, founder of R-Power Motion, inventor of the CGX Gearbox Technology and of the Knowledge Creation and Management Framework.
Professional work and skills
My unwavering commitment to work and continuous innovation, combined with a lack of resources in my early professional days and my gift of being a fast learner, have enabled me to develop a wide range of skills and experiences:
Scientific Research in Actuation
I developed numerous theories for gearbox and actuator performance description, explanation and prediction. If you’re curious to get a glimpse on some of them, here’s an extract of some interesting developments:
• Creation of very specific gear theory for unconventional gearing that led to the CGX gearbox technology, breaking the very fundamentals of gear theory to achieve what is claimed impossible in every gear book.
• Reactive power approach: a new approach on power loss predictions in power transmission, significantly speeding up the development of predictive models while lowering the needs for computational power, providing a more intuitive insight on performance predictions, and enabling easy modeling of highly complex transmissions such as exotic differential planetaries configurations.
• Apparent reflected inertia and impact resistance: thorough analysis of the problematic linked to transmission transparency and reflected inertia after elimination of the commonly accepted yet significantly unrealistic assumption of no power loss. Very interesting results arose like the fact reflected inertia can be made reduction-ratio independent depending on the design and the use case.
• Extensive critical review of robotic actuation literature
Engineering
This is supposed to be the core of my work as a mechanical engineer by training at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (Switzerland). I developed gearbox, actuator and machine designs, as well as test procedures, data post-processing, performance optimization models and strategies. The below covers a portion of what I did in pure engineering:
• Development of a family of architectures and designs for the ground breaking CGX gearbox technology. It includes all the performance modeling tools.
• Development of dozens of gearbox and actuator complete designs, including specific performance modeling tools and optimization. I performed detailed performance predictions on about 15 unconventional reducer technologies for robotics applications, and reviewed more than a 100 different technologies thanks to the versatility and universality of the performance prediction tools I created.
• Development of test procedures. Analysis of test results with data post-processing, performance interpretation and improvement strategies for future iterations.
Leadership
The experience of bringing to life a disruptive technology, basically trying to develop electricity in a market of candles, naturally put me in a leadership position. It has included:
• Development of innovative application analysis, especially in the domain of legged robots and emerging robotic markets, that strongly connected both engineering and strategical planning.
• Development of market penetration strategy for a ground breaking reducer technology.
• Development of mind-ergonomic product roadmaps and goals.
• Knowledge coordination through every level of the company: manufacturing, engineering, marketing, strategical planning.
Applied Epistemology
The knowledge-first approach I developed can basically be labelled as applied epistemology for the needs of power actuation engineering. In doing so I made the:
• Development of a knowledge creation and management framework.
• Development of strategies for identification of the limits of the state of the art.
• Development of knowledge improvement strategies.
• Identification of major threats coming from the illusion of knowledge, and development of tools to tackle those threats.
Legal, IP, Technology Transfer
In the way of giving birth to the disruptive CGX gearbox technology, I acquired experience in intellectual property protection, license negotiations, and technology transfer. I’ve been also in the middle of a M&A in my quality of licensor and owner of the CGX IP.
Prototyping
During my early days of creating new solutions to actuation, I was clearly lacking resources and had to build prototypes myself. I spent several hundreds of hours cutting parts with conventional lathes and milling machines, which I still owns today! It brought me some valuable experience in machining and tooling.
A last aspect of my experience, while it is definitely the least academical aspect of my background, is the experience I acquired by repairing and maintaining a wide variety of machines. It brought me a lot of general culture in mechanical engineering. I learnt the hard way what is great, and what sucks. Over time, I’ve sometimes be refered to as “the guy you need to call when that crappy thing doesn’t work and nobody has a clue why”.
My journey
My passion for machine design and innovation has always been anchored in the two things I love the most: value creation through long term progress, and deep connection with the reality in the field.
The journey started in my teenage years by having some fun building from scratch a mechanical hand. To my surprise, the fun quickly turned into impactful projects. On the way of making an improved version of that mechanical hand, I developed an innovative high ratio, high torque, compact gearbox technology named DSSPT. Though sadly withdraw before publication, I filed my first ever patent application in collaboration with the EPFL and the LSRO laboratory.
But no worries, that was for the best! The idea of the CGX gearbox technology was on its way. While it all sparked from the interpretation of an apparently unsignificant plus-or-minus sign in a gear pair efficiency equation, I ended up developing a brand new theoretical background in gear design and built key prototypes that indicated the CGX gearbox technology had the potential to performs at both high ratio, high efficiency, high torque, and low cost. A first of its kind! And believe me, that was outstandingly breathtaking! Between the fear of making errors in the models that could have wiped out any alleged fundamental advantage of the technology, and the excitement of being a pioneer on the way to discover what was universally claimed to be impossible, the ride was intense.
Soon, a partnership to develop the CGX gearbox technology was made with Genesis Robotics and Motion Technologies, a Koch Engineered Solution’s company. Designs were improved and the technology thoroughly tested up to the point we had extensive evidence of the absolute superior performances of the technology.
And yet, despite that technical success, we were struggling making commercial sense of the doors the CGX technology opened. That strange duality became clear: the same way it is impossible to find value in electricity by constantly benchmarking against candles, the CGX gearbox technology wasn’t an easy sale. It’s at this very moment that I shifted from a technical-first approach to a knowledge-first approach: even with a ground-breaking technology in hands, what truly matters isn’t much what we currently do, but rather how bold we can envision the future being thanks to disruptive innovation, and then what we can do to create the path that connects the disruptive now to the bold future.
This all paved the way to my second major invention: I introduced years of intensive thoughts experiments and learnings into my knowledge creation and management framework. The spark came from the very spark of the CGX technology: if the interpretation of an apparently unsignificant plus-or-minus sign can lead to redefining a centuries old gear theory, turning to almost useless decades of worldwide research in actuation, and unveil allegedly impossible potential about the future of robotics, then how could one foster the next sparks, and how can we create a better future along the way.
While Koch Engineered Solution choose to cease the operations with Genesis Robotics, I made the choice to pursue on creating value with the CGX gearbox technology and my knowledge creation and management framework. I’m presenting you the (re)birth of R-Power Motion.
The next steps are going to be even bolder than shaking an industry that haven’t seen major technological improvement in the past 70 years!
