Today, RISE™ is a thriving industrial technology company endeavoring to disrupt the field of hydraulics, utilizing an innovative mechanical system to replace the most inefficient elements of power transmission and generate high-performance, zero-emissions heavy machinery. The RISE™Technology we know now is a breakthrough development in an industry that has remained largely stagnant over recent decades, and, inside, you will find that its power lies in a novel design that subverts traditional thought in actuation. Flouting assumptions of ability and limitations, this discovery in engineering was made possible by a unique approach in which our team reimagines how machines are designed on every level, from architecture, to usability, to aesthetics—an approach whose foundation lies in the unconventional beginnings of RISE™ and our journey in bringing RISE™Technology to its current form.

Though potentially surprising, RISE™ was not conceived with the vision of producing an alternative to hydraulics. Instead, founder and Chief Technology Officer, Blake Sessions set out with a singular, highly ambitious goal in mind: to revolutionize the field of human motion by producing a next-generation, recreation-focused exosuit capable of offering superhuman strength and speed while being lightweight and energy-efficient. A simple concept at its core conceptualized as conventional clothing items like belts, pants, boots, and jackets, the suit would grant the user all the mobility of a car and numerous other improvements on human capabilities.

At their graduation from MIT, Co-Founder and now CEO, Arron Acosta joined forces with Founder Blake Sessions, whose expertise in biomechanics and experience working in biomechatronics on exoskeletons and prostheses provided a perspective necessary to the endeavor. Working from their two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the kitchen served as both office and prototyping center, Arron and Blake spent the company's first year of existence, 2011, set on developing the various technologies required to realize their vision for advanced human motion, exploring new spring varieties, harnesses, clutches, and methods of storing and delivering power between parts.

Following a chance reconnection with Arron, mechanical engineering and fellow MIT graduate, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering Toomas Sepp joined the team in 2012, leading them to move to the Cambridge Innovation Center. He offered capabilities in conceptualization, design, and construction that pushed the project further, allowing them to create prototypes and test hypotheses freely as they attempted to overcome a famous challenge of exosuit development— delivering to the suit the power needed for effective performance with a source and mechanism able to interface seamlessly with the body.

Efforts toward this goal eventually produced a hypothesis for a new power transmission method with the potential for application across numerous fields and types of machinery. This officially marked the beginning of RISE™'s transition from recreational exosuits to industrial technology.

Having then outgrown their current spaces, the team briefly took up station at TechStars before moving to a more permanent position at Greentown Labs, where access to office and prototyping spaces as well as tools such as SolidWorks and MATLAB allowed them to spend the next several years proving the viability of their idea for alternative hydraulics and conceptualizing its implementation in various machines. In 2014, Arron would approach Creative Director and Director of Business Development Kyle Dell'Aquila, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, with a small, 3D printed actuator driven by a simple remote, dubbed "the cyclone." Surprised by the impressive amount of power produced by this tiny device, Kyle recognized its potential for use in heavy industrial machinery and was inspired to join the team, helping in visualizing and communicating to the world a design whose aesthetics displayed its versatility and efficacy, as well as the company's story and values. Operating on a tight budget consisting primarily of angel investments, this core group—Arron, Blake, Toomas, and Kyle—would spend the next several years in a discovery phase aimed at fully realizing the actuator's potential.

Eventually, our founders would meet with a challenge that, in overcoming, led them to the breakthrough that solidified the pursuit of transforming hydraulics and shaped the company's future into what we see today. The discovery came while the team was creating and testing various tensile elements in air compressors, looking to find one suitable to their design, capable of operating optimally within size constraints dictated by actuator structure.

Although the team had discovered a material capable of high performance, its applications were minimal, spurring them to explore new designs, mechanisms, and geometries that might improve its potential, much more complex than those generally recommended for tensile elements. Each of these constructions underwent strenuous testing, during which the team noted one as having a particular section of aggressively twisted belt that degraded at a far lower rate than expected.

There are two ways to ensure that a belt will degrade quickly. The first is twisting the belt while in motion, causing the force to focus on its innermost structure. The second is fleeting it or bending it around an axis perpendicular to the belt's plane. This is accepted as a universal truth within the belt world needing no further evaluation; intentionally causing either is simply out of the question. Yet, lacking a background in traditional hydraulics or cable technologies, the team was unafraid to investigate the twisted belt anomaly, employing each member's knowledge and capabilities in their investigation.

Early High Reduction RISE™ Belt Actuators

World renowned wire rope expert Roland Verreet became inspired by the RISE™ mission that he gave a seminar tailored to their efforts, which was instrumental in the team taking their testing effort even further. Digging deep into the micro-interactions causing the twisted belt to fail, deploying thermal cameras and other data collection methods, the team identified the area of weakness and found that skewing the belt (i.e., fleeting it) prevented the degradation from occurring. With design changes implemented, Blake performed the necessary mathematical proofs to confirm this concept, and experimental test data was utilized to validate them.

Thus, RISE™ landed upon the discovery that disproved common belt wisdom and cemented the viability of RISE™Technology: though twisting or fleeting a belt is guaranteed to cause failure, combining the two produces a belt with a lifespan far greater than in its original form. This discovery opened an entirely new design space, allowing for belts to be routed in smaller areas and far more compact ways than a traditional system, whose durability hinges upon being larger. Moving away from air compressors toward more ambitious endeavors, the team was resolved to replace hydraulics in all its applications and even go places where hydraulics cannot.

The RISE™ of today is best characterized by our commitment to creating machines that are not only effective but also highly efficient, intuitive, and refined. We offer a fresh take on actuation that reimagines how power is delivered to equipment of all sizes—an interpretation that, oddly enough, would not have been possible without beginning where we did, with the distant vision of exosuits for advanced human motion. Pursuing this ambitious goal generated a technology that would have been thought implausible at best to work within the confines of conventional hydraulics. With the new mission this bestowed, we have continuously moved toward applying the unique approach to engineering our upbringing created wherever possible.