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Flexible monocopter drone can be completely rolled up

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Re: Flexible monocopter drone can be completely rolled up

#3
> The total weight of F-SAM is just 69g, of which nearly 40% is battery, yielding a flight time of about 16 minutes.

Nice to see mechanical performance qualities (battery mass percentage), and battery/aerodynamic performance qualities (minutes per mass percentage) condensed to such a small set of numbers. Unfortunately battery and aerodynamic qualities aren't really separable, but if we assume batteries to be a constant between designs (they are all generic off-the-shelf parts after all) "minutes per mass percentage" becomes a quite interesting metric.

Re: Flexible monocopter drone can be completely rolled up

#8
post #4

Amazing tech. Combined with a fast fixed cam it would maybe be possible to get a 360 degree FOV.

A line scanner, like the proposed LIDAR implemention. We use line scanners for paper. You could certainly put a line scanner behind a conventional lens but it would feel kind of weird to "waste" an entire dimension of the lenses projection qualities. Would there be opportunities for design compromises favoring one direction over the other? (I'm thinking of the weird eyes we find in flight animals like sheep that need full horizon perception more than point of interest focus)

Re: Flexible monocopter drone can be completely rolled up

#9
I tried to do a similar thing with a single actuator frisbee. The goal would be a frisbee with a single fin could fly anywhere when launched out of some high power launcher.

The goal was to make a single-use aircraft which could go anywhere in a city for under $1. By making the aircraft unpowered and under 250g, lots of regulations no longer apply, and it becomes practical to use them to deliver small items.

The fin was actuated by a 10 cent microcontroller using a ultra low cost GPS and light sensor (for sun position), powered for up to 2 minutes by a coin cell.

The challenge was that it seems gyroscopic effects means that if a frisbee has lift and moves forward in the air, it will always see a (very slow) turning moment that requires a massive fin to counteract. The end result is the frisbee eventually turns to vertical and falls out of the air.

My prototype could still land gently anywhere in a football field when thrown by hand, which I was pretty pleased with, and had a BOM under $1!

If anyone has any ideas to make this not happen, I'd like to hear them.

Re: Flexible monocopter drone can be completely rolled up

#10
It folds into a small storage tube, is lightweight, has good autonomy, makes little noise, and safely autogyrates to the ground on failure. If you could somehow add a camera and stabilise it, it could make an excellent search drone for search / rescue / military ops.
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