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Cleo Robotics Demonstrates Uniquely Clever Ducted Fan Drone

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Re: Cleo Robotics Demonstrates Uniquely Clever Ducted Fan Drone

#31
post #4

Perhaps the attitude of each fan blade rotates independently. To angle the drone, say, forwards, the fan blades might angle flat when they're at the forward position, every cycle, and angle tilted at the backwards position? Seems expensive and tricky though.

"An Underactuated Propeller for Attitude Control in Micro Air Vehicles" Paper is not free but video conveys the idea well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZe7l5_LfoA Likely with clever two-material molding you could do away with the hinge and it would look similar to the prototype shown in the article.

Oh, that's clever. Very nice. Tough to design, cheap to manufacture in quantity.

Re: Cleo Robotics Demonstrates Uniquely Clever Ducted Fan Drone

#34
Unless the fit of the casing parts is atrocious, there appears to be a slit right above the grey ring the camera is mounted in.

Due to the shape, and it's location it's quite possible that internal shutters or ducts can be configured so as to allow partially disrupting the coanda effect on either side by selectively allowing air to exit through the slit. Possibly, but not necessarily ducted in from the fans high pressure zone.

This would likely cause a rather strong vectoring of the thrust as it would also almost certainly lower the lift on the detached side due to interactions with the fans.

If that isn't how its done, I'm quite positive it can be done in this way. I'll be happy to be named inventor in any thusly aquired patent and collect a very modest licensing fee, if only that would be how the world works...

Re: Cleo Robotics Demonstrates Uniquely Clever Ducted Fan Drone

#36

Unless the fit of the casing parts is atrocious, there appears to be a slit right above the grey ring the camera is mounted in. Due to the shape, and it's location it's quite possible that internal shutters or ducts can be configured so as to allow partially disrupting the coanda effect on either side by selectively allowing air to exit through the slit. Possibly, but not necessarily ducted in from the fans high pres…

[deleted]

Re: Cleo Robotics Demonstrates Uniquely Clever Ducted Fan Drone

#37
post #21
post #16

Throwing my idea out there: What if the to propellers are synched. Depending on desired direction, they are "un-synched" ever so slightly. This causes additional thrust on one side of the "duct".

ATH Zurich have a single prop craft that uses just a single channel high speed motor control to stabilise and steer it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3fM6VwXXFM I wonder if this maybe has two contra rotating single blade props that they can control quickly enough to be able to speed them up for half a revolution to generate asymmetric thrust to provide pitch and roll?

Pictures show 2*3 blades (well, one three bladed and two blades of a similar layout, with one obscured)

But it could still be based on the same idea: if the blades are not flexing in the same way under acceleration, any asymmetry might do it, if it can be properly controlled.

Which brings us to how I thought this thing does pitch/roll until I noticed that I just got hung up on a difference between a prototype in the picture and a later iteration in the video: contrarotating propellers will influence each other when blades meet, creating nonuniform efficiency over the duration of a rotation. Three peaks and three troughs, like the legs of miniscule of pressure differential. I don't know where the peaks would be relative to the meeting points, but given the general fickleness of aerodynamics thrust of contrarotating propellers just can't be perfectly even all around the rotation. But that's still three-symmetric. It could become a control option when overlapped it with e.g. an n-symmetric grid where n is not a multiple of three, even if not a good one (mixing it with yaw would be a wobbly mess). The prototype picture shows five arms which is how I got the idea, but in the video it seems to be six/three, so this candidate is out (unless the specifically made a misleading dummy for the video, which I don't think, even though the video is cut in a way that it might be).

Re: Cleo Robotics Demonstrates Uniquely Clever Ducted Fan Drone

#38
> With fewer motors than conventional quadrotors, it promises to be more efficient as well [...]

I doubt that, because in "stacked propellers" configuration the second propeller gets very turbulent air, causing extra noise and vibration, i.e. loss of efficiency.

Re: Cleo Robotics Demonstrates Uniquely Clever Ducted Fan Drone

#40

> Cleo, meanwhile, boasts a useful battery life in the 12-15 minute range For some definition of useful. Batteries really are the worst thing ever. We got dense energy from oil so early, and then nada.

If there is a charger at each desk only 5 minutes of battery is needed.
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