Service To Entrepreneurship:
The Path of Mike Dowell husband-and-wife team, Mike and Sandy Dowell (not pictured) know what it’s like to support each other through every adventure that life brings. Married for 37 years, Sandy and Mike met shortly after he finished his tour in the Army. Mike was a tank commander in which he was in charge of many important missions. “The military set me up for success," said Mike. "It taught me how to be a leader and how to persevere through hard times. The Army taught me the importance of teamwork. Being a tanker gave me the strength of independent leadership. One takeaway from my tour in the Army is, ‘Fight a good fight, for tomorrow will still come.’ I use all these skills from my time in the service daily in all aspects of my life, especially for my business ventures.”
By Wendy Klug
74
JUNE 2021
After his four-year stint in the Army, Mike and Sandy set out on multiple business ventures
ranging from automotive to digital photography, each one leading closer to the culmination in Mobile Recon Systems (MRS). They started MRS in 2014 with the intent of designing and prototyping a ground-based unmanned vehicle, an Advanced Video Rover, or AVR. It was outfitted with multiple cameras with full 180-degree coverage and a six foot depth of field robotic arm, and a footprint comparable to a laptop computer. Its intended purpose was for border patrol. This design progressed to an airborne variant as they determined that fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or (UAVs) descending from gliders had already penetrated the market, but multi-rotor aircraft had been barely touched, especially for heavy payloads with long endurance. A short time after designing and building some of their earlystage multi-rotors, they caught the attention of the National Science Foundation and received a grant. This NSF grant enabled MRS to refine its designs. By 2018, the company reached a point where they needed to expand.
