Motor Control Platform for Hydrofoil Propulsion Research and Development

The water-sports market was valued at $15 billion USD in 2024 (Forbes). Electric hydrofoils (eFoils) are rapidly gaining popularity in this sector with innovations in motor control, battery efficiency, user experience and the ability to fly above the water anywhere. This project was in collaboration with Flite, an industry leader in the eFoil space who looks to continue spearheading the market through innovation and engineering.

Brushless Electric Motor control is a difficult beast, but simple in concept: a rotating magnet has to be kept in constant misalignment with a magnetic field, and its "opposites attract" causing it to spin - how hard could that be? To control an electric motor, you need a few things:

1. A device must have hardware capable of generating this magnetic field,

2. Said device must know where the rotor is (otherwise, how does it know what field to produce?),

3. This device must be performant to respond to rotor position changes when spinning at thousands of RPM.

Many projects involving brushless electric motors simply buy a controller off-the-shelf, but it is believed that by creating a custom in-house solution, valuable performance gains can be made by tuning the controller specifically for hydrofoils. The Flite ESC project has been in the works, starting with the hardware design by Sebastian Bilios for his thesis (now a UQ graduate and Flite engineer) and the controller software/firmware by Matthew Hoffman as his thesis.

With an advanced data logging system and modular, simulator-friendly design, the Flite ESC provides the ultimate electric motor research and development platform to continue pushing innovation in foiling.