41–50 of 52 posts
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A slight tilt in the direction of flight?
Surprisingly it's going the same speed of 8m/s as the previous forward flight...
The top speed for winged flight is likely higher than helicopter mode.
Interesting research. Assuming that the benefit of fixed-wing aircraft is efficiency in relatively straight flight, I'm wondering how this aircraft compares in efficiency vs agility against a quadcopter of similar weight.
What would be your guess? I'm reading this as describing straight line wing flight for long distances rapidly shifting to erratic motions if someone doesn't like it existing. I imagine it's much more efficient at that, assuming that shell is mostly batteries anyway. Very neat to watch, I'd be curious to hear under what conditions it's worse than a quadcopter, perhaps stability or how quick it can turn.
Well, a quadcopter can fly with one busted motor/prop, this thing probably can't.
Winged flight is definitely for superior distance and loiter times.
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It’s definitely been done before. The closest to this design off the top of my head would be the Lockhead XFV (1954): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_XFV The idea of a VTOL tailsitter, but without the single primary planar wing surface, goes much further back. The Nazis were in the process of building the Triebflügel at the end of WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Triebflügel
yeah there were a handful of tailsitter designs that era. Cool concepts but pretty much all had an achille's heel or two.
Ah, tailsitters. Everyone loves the theory, then the practical realities of the takeoff position exposing the entire wing surface to the prevailing wind quickly kills real-world applications. I remember back during the 3D Robotics heyday watching Chris Anderson repeatedly run down to set his tailsitter upright, take a few steps back, only to watch it fall over again.
I'm not with Martin, but scuttlebutt is that the flight controls take into account takeoff and landing winds, then use that to adjust the flight attitude on approach and takeoff, since the wind can add to the effective airspeed for rotation.
Once it tags the ground the flight procedures have it nail itself to the pad double quick. That's about the only dodgy part, but they've done it from the back of a speeding truck and it looked fine. Hell of a lot finer than "drive the plane into a rubber band hanging from a stick".
Do these designs scale up? Don’t see why we haven’t created full sized aircraft with this form factor. Seems like it would make a great aerial weapons platform.
Probably nowhere near this performance. Their motors instantly vary thrust by a factor of ten or more, this just can't be done at human scale.
Those rotary woofers deliver supposedly good distortion up to their rotation frequency; 13 Hz / 800rpm seems common. For reference, a tail sitter propeller would probably spin faster than that, though even this is plenty to control the aircraft. A blade design using a servo flap easily keeps up with those control speeds, and could likely even offer thrust vectoring like the rotor of a helicopter (could eliminate the flaperons).
The real enemy is power-to-weight ratio.
Seeing it fly side-ways in circles (2 minutes into the 1st of the final 3 videos) is pretty wild. Not sure how the 2 rotors can create sideways thrust...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be your guess? I'm reading this as describing straight line wing flight for long distances rapidly shifting to erratic motions if someone doesn't like it existing. I imagine it's much more efficient at that, assuming that shell is mostly batteries anyway. Very neat to watch, I'd be curious to hear under what conditions it's worse than a quadcopter, perhaps stability or how quick it can turn.
> Very neat to watch, I'd be curious to hear under what conditions it's worse than a quadcopter, perhaps stability or how quick it can turn. Well, a quadcopter can fly with one busted motor/prop, this thing probably can't. Winged flight is definitely for superior distance and loiter times.
Another obvious drawback would be more surface to get buffeted by wind when in hover.
I'm curious if it'd be harder for a soldier to spot a tailsitting drone high in the sky floating above doing surveillance. They are already impossible to spot as it is at certain heights. It would have to be right above them though.
Does visibility matter? I imagine a drone hunter flight of multiple drones, multiple drones implies multiple receivers, multilaterating the transmissions of the target, and splash. Only works on surveillence drones that need to be transmitting, and don't emit only in the direction of the intended receiver.
People really fixate on this swarming concept like that murderbots video and breeze right past the more high impact basics.
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There are commercially available tailsitter UAVs primarily used for mapping purposes: https://www.atmosuav.com/product/mapping-drone-marlyn?view=w... It transitions into forward wing flight after take off. It does achieve a greater flight distance/flight time per battery compared to the same size of thing as a quadcopter, but NOT as great of endurance as something like a 2 meter wingspan VTOL with four lift motors +…
I (as someone without a need for any drone and therefore without having looked at enough prices of drones to have any gut instinct here) was curious how much that first one you linked - the Marlyn UAV - might cost, since the company only says to contact them for pricing. This page [1] suggests $17k, is that likely on the money (pun intended, sorry) or just a random scam site? [1] https://volatusdrones.com/products/at…
go look at pricing for the DJI Matrice 30 (M30) for some comparisons...