How REGENT Built a Flight-Ready Telemetry Backbone with Nominal

Mission Brief: REGENT

• Founded: 2020
• Headquarters: North Kingstown, Rhode Island
• Mission: Fast, safe coastal transit aboard electric Seaglider vessels.
• Core Technology: Commercial Seaglider, high-speed hydrofoiling wing-in-ground effect (WIG) craft that operate over the water within a wingspan of the surface.
• Focus: Transform prototype vehicles into safe, routine flight operations on open water.

The challenge: Real-time operations & rapid data review

REGENT is building a first-of-its-kind vehicle, and preparing for their first flight. Their team is laser-focused on developing their innovative technology as fast as possible with safety built into every moment.

To achieve these ambitious goals, REGENT needs their data architecture to serve two distinct, critical needs: real-time decision-making and in-depth data review.

1. Live go / no-go Calls: Every phase demands near-zero latency signals from Seaglider to engineering operators. As a crewed vehicle still in development, accurate safety-monitoring is a non-negotiable. REGENT engineers needed a continuous, cohesive view of their craft’s health as they executed their tests.
2. Comprehensive data review: For REGENT, every data point and piece of context is critical. As a new kind of vehicle, REGENT is setting new criteria for ‘nominal’ system performance with every test. They needed a solution that gave a clear picture of what happened, why, and how it compares to historical data.

For most companies, executing against these challenges means building a real-time telemetry stack in-house and performing disjointed, local analysis separately. This requires months of high-risk development, delayed timelines, and ongoing management that diverts critical engineering focus.

Instead, REGENT chose Nominal.

Nominal in action

Nominal Core served both of REGENT’s needs with data architecture tailor-made for mission-critical hardware testing. Core provided low-latency streaming, cloud-native data review, and automatic comparisons with historical data.

1. Live telemetry for live go / no-go calls

Nominal streamed sub-300 ms latency telemetry directly to REGENT support boats and the control room. REGENT engineers had a continuous view of craft performance with customized dashboards and data charts.

To work within network bandwidth constraints and minimize latency, Core selectively streamed in safety-critical channels. Nominal’s computation engine used the REGENT team’s pre-built thresholds to automatically identify anomalies and monitor system health. If any critical channel hit an unsafe range, every REGENT engineer would know in under a second.

2. Comprehensive data review

After the test, REGENT’s team batch-uploads full-rate data from their thousands of onboard sensors and data channels. The data is also synchronized in Nominal with video and audio from the tests to provide additional information and context.

Getting answers requires more than just plotting. Nominal Core’s cloud-based architecture enables easy comparisons to historical data so REGENT’s engineers have every prior test right at their fingertips. Component acceptance tests, float tests, system checks: all indexed, retrievable, and queryable.

Nominal then identifies readings as in-family or out-of-family to inform decisions. No manually rummaging through CSVs, no eye-balling old Jupyter plots. Just clear, relevant context – so the team can proceed with confidence.

Results

• Zero internal tooling distraction: By skipping internal tooling, REGENT saved months of delays and full-time software engineers, but still had access to tool support and feature development from Nominal to support needed testing
• Safe, successful foil testing: Delayed, eye-balled monitoring transformed into real-time, automated safety checks. REGENT achieved “safe by design” at every phase.
• Accelerated test cadence: Multi-day test review compressed into just minutes. Engineers were ready to brief test findings the same day as testing.

Looking ahead

REGENT's upcoming flight tests will seamlessly integrate altitude, airspeed, and wing load data into Nominal's existing infrastructure, requiring no new tooling. As REGENT begins producing additional vehicles, the plan would be for Nominal to support end-of-line tests and vehicle certification, using historical test data as benchmarks.

REGENT leverages Nominal’s data backbone to help keep Seaglider vessels on a safe, repeatable trajectory – turning every test into a stepping stone for the next.