Meet Hope Technik, Singapore’s engineering commandos

Hope Technik’s drone army. The cage sitting at the back is a proof-of-concept for allowing drones to move while indoors – think of it as a hamster wheel run amok.

Somewhere in Singapore, a black building sits in an obscure industrial estate, accessible only to determined Singaporeans. It’s not hard to spot though: it’s the only building there that’s painted black. Welcome to the home of Hope Technik, perhaps one of the most underrated tech companies in Singapore.

Founded and staffed by a group of hardware, software, and space engineers, the startup prides itself as a playground for tinkerers and geeks.

Sitting next to the entrance is an old-school roadster that is custom-built by a team member. A standard obstacle course – a dreaded thing among Singapore’s army conscripts – occupies the front lawn, serving as a testing ground for Hope Technik’s ground robots.

The company’s ten commandments, which accosts visitors upon entering, stands out the most. The ninth commandment goes: “We learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” The second one reads: “We are engineering commandos. Small in number, strong in force”.

Real-life Tony Stark

Hope Technik, which now has 50 employees (over half are engineers), defies categorization. It designs and makes drones for clients, yet also does simple exterior design work on police cars and fire fighting vehicles for the government. It pushes the limits on robotics and concluded a space plane project with Airbus, yet a lot of its income comes from consultancy and prototyping work that won’t have stratospheric returns in the short-term.

“We created the company because we like to design and engineer things,” Michael Leong, co-founder and general manager of Hope Technik, tells Tech in Asia. “We started offering services to help clients design and engineer products and solve problems. We wanted to be the best engineers in town.”

Hope Technik has more up its sleeves. It’s prototyping an exoskeleton (no photos allowed) that could have military, logistical, and healthcare uses. It could lift heavy objects and teach stroke patients how to walk again. The company has also sold a few dozen Alert devices that detect falls in a home and notifies a loved one – useful for elderly folks living alone.

The company is also betting massively on swarm artificial intelligence. Leong says that drones have a constraint: they’re conceived to replace a single person’s dull, dirty, and dangerous job. Instead, drones should create “force multiplication”, in which an attribute can multiply the effectiveness of a military force.

“With swarm intelligence, I only need to focus on my end-goals. Instead of being a middle manager of drones, I let the computer do it for me,” says Leong.

This could be useful in surveillance as well as search and rescue, as a group of drones can figure out among themselves which one needs to return to base, which ones need refueling, and so on.

The climatic battle of Iron Man 3 – a favorite movie within the company – explores this concept when Tony Stark called upon all his Iron Man suits to do battle against the enemy.

The anti-startup

Patriotic tinkerers