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Ikarus electric “rocket” – Thrust-vectored flying ducted fan [video]
- walrus01 8y agoearlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_RQ-16_T-Hawk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_RQ-16_T-Hawk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_VZ-1_Pawnee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_VZ-1_Pawnee
- vackosar 8y ago(earlier non electric)
- consp 8y agoNot quite, as they use contra rotating fans to counter the gyroscopic forces the creator had to tackle. The RS-16 might have a single but can't find any info on it.
- kaffeemitsahne 8y agoSomewhere in the youtube comments it says it uses fans below the propeller to counteract the torque.
- sebastos 8y agoEDIT: Nevermind, it appears you're right!
- chillingeffect 8y agoWow, it seemed straight forward for the first 10 minutes or so, when he introduced the biggest challenge: gyroscopic motion due to the high speed rotation. this is a gripping video.
- stickfigure 8y agoI was expecting some sort of dynamic feedback system based on a gyro sensor, but apparently the compensation is just hard-coded? I'm amazed that can work.
- Animats 8y agoDucted-fan VTOL aircraft are surprisingly stable. Here's the Hiller Flying Platform of the 1950s.[1] It's very stable, even though top-heavy. It's mostly steered by leaning, but there are thrust-vectoring vanes to control yaw. Many variations on this theme were tried in the 1950s, and many of them flew. But it never caught on. There's been recent interest in larger ducted fan drones. This apparently scales better than quadrotors. But nobody seems to really need large ducted fan drones. If you like early small VTOL craft, many of them ended up in the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, CA. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FS3D1rCos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FS3D1rCos
- rtkwe 8y agoYou have to pre-program in the compensation because it basically rotates your controls 90 degrees which isn't something a simple feedback loop can deal with. No matter how fancy the feedback system is if you swap 2 controls its not going to be stable, it'll spend the whole time chasing the problem.
- blt 8y agoThe gyro effect is pretty predictable. Anything where you're pretty confident in your model, it's better to compensate in the feedforward part of the controller than to push it into the feedback part. Think about gravity compensation - adding a constant amount of thrust to cancel out your weight. It's not going to match the model perfectly due to error in your attitude estimate, but it's still better than treating gravity force as an unmodeled disturbance. Gyro compensation is similar.
- RachelF 8y agoYes, it is impressive that he got it going with PID controllers plus whatever else is in the controller firmware. This sort of inverted pendulum type system would typically require at least 1/s^2 control. It also has the additional complexity of gyroscopic torques, center of thrust not through center of gravity and servo control lag. This is similar to controlling a rocket, something the Germans took a long time to perfect with the WW2 V2 missile.
- nodesocket 8y agoAmazingly cool. If he can find some lighter batteries with the same output it would make a huge improvement in stability I am assuming.
- patpatpat 8y agoIf it's heavier it's actually more stable because it's harder to move a heavier object. But maybe you mean that a heavier craft is slower to stabilise?
- dmix 8y agoIn the future I have a feeling that's the sound you hear before death is approaching in a battlefield. Much the same way as the sound of jets overhead or the squeal of dive bombers in WW2 or the whistling of artillery in WW1.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoIf the flying death machines are going to make that much noise, it should be fairly straight forward to use a few microphones and CNC machine guns to locate and shoot them down.
- Gibbon1 8y agoCar Bombs + self driving cars is going to be an utter shit show.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoDon’t even need the bomb part, just command it to drive through a crowd on a national holiday / event. No driver to shoot dead. I’m surprised someone hasn’t hooked up a remote control interface to an existing car.
- newnewpdro 8y agoOr hack the network they're all connected to and direct hoards of cars traveling at maximum speed into your target. This kind of stuff was done in the Daemon/Freedom sci-fi books, which are entertaining and becoming concerningly less fiction with every passing year.
- ben_w 8y agoIf they’re capable of acting on such a command, somebody has messed up. That’s not to say it won’t happen (Uber) but it shouldn’t.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
- newnewpdro 8y agoVery cool, some nice hands-on engineering going on here.
- msadowski 8y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one that found this project fascinating (see my http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-robotics-4 http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-robotics-4). If you are interested in drones/robotics then it's very well worth it to watch this video. You can learn a lot from the author.
- cyberferret 8y agoGreat project. Though as a former pilot, I was wincing at all the foreign object ingestion happening in the opening sequence! :)
- mmjaa 8y agoI was wincing at that too, but then I realised its probably just as well it was tested in such an environment. ;)
- Serow225 8y agoYeah it could have used a FOD trigger warning ;)
- leafario2 8y agoFOD: Fear of Destruction?
- Serow225 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage :)
- madeuptempacct 8y agoShould have flown a MIG-29.
- est 8y agoTotal noob here, what's the difference between wrapping a quadcopter with a duct and this? Is it because a single rotor is much harder?
- hoorayimhelping 8y agoI believe a quadcopter has variable-pitch wings that spin to create lift. This is a fan that pushes a column of air down to create thrust. Helicopter blades pull the vehicle up from the top, rocket thrust pushes the vehicle up from the bottom.
- FredFS456 8y agoQuadcopters never have variable pitch props, they just vary the speed of them to vary thrust. Moreover, thrust from the bottom or top doesn't really matter (look up the Pendulum Rocket Fallacy)
- dirktheman 8y agoWell, they usually don't have variable pitch. But there are a few rare examples of variable pitch quadcopters, for instance this monster from Curtis Youngblood: http://www.curtisyoungblood.com/legacy-product-support-curtis-youngblood/attachment/stingray-500/ http://www.curtisyoungblood.com/legacy-product-support-curti...
- modzu 8y agoneat! but (speaking of the pendulum fallacy) if the fuel tank was attached with cables instead of a fixed structure, wouldn't that actually work?
- ryanmarsh 8y agoFor most applications you don’t need variable pitch blades on a quadcopter, they’re also very delicate and break easily on drones. I used to fly r/c helicopters before drones became popular. The pitch mechanism was routinely a source of problems for me. It’s pretty amazing to watch it work though.
- 8y ago
- sonium 8y agoAs I understand, much of the difficulty controlling this comes from the gyroscopic effect. So wouldn't it be feasable to add a gearbox and a secondary rotary mass to cancel out the angular momentum? If you spin the secondary mass fast enough it also wouldn't add that much weight.
- newnewpdro 8y agoThe video covers this...
- k__ 8y agoAdding weight to solve this problem doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
- kjeetgill 8y agoPardon my ignorance. Is this that different from a helicopter besides having walls? Does this mechanism serve a different purpose?
- danboarder 8y agoA helicopter uses a rear rotor to counteract the main rotor rotation. Here he is using thrust vectoring to perform that task.
- kjeetgill 8y agoAh, thanks! Some helecoptors also just use a second main rotor spinning in the opposite direction instead right? Would that not be sufficient? Sorry if it's covered in the video I've only seen the beginning so far.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Moru 8y agoYes but he only had one fan. Just a rotating ring mounted somewhere would help too. But not as much fun I guess :-)
- lolc 8y agoThis is visible in the very last scene where it automatically tilts its blades to counteract the rotation induced by the accelerating propeller.
- jmpeax 8y agoCool, add a camera and some AI and you've got an autonomous leaf blower.
- jazzyjackson 8y agothe future is loud
- sonaltr 8y agoI wonder how much more power you can provide it to lift a human for a say half an hour. I've always wanted to build a jetpack like that from xDubai [0]. This is definitely easier to build for an amateur compared to the one professionally built in the video. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VPvKl6ezyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VPvKl6ezyc
- benjiweber 8y agoRichard Browning's suit is even more impressive, but presumably infeasible to do with electricity with current technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DafoDiRvGLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DafoDiRvGLM
- aidenn0 8y agoIt would probably look something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD8vcTCWpmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD8vcTCWpmo
- sonaltr 8y agoI saw that and while that is super cool - (it's being sold for ~$100K btw), that's not what I was looking for. (think more human plane / human with wings rather than an human + machine if that makes sense) (more horizontal than vertical if you will - I'm getting my solo skydive certification soon and my plan is to move on to wing gliding - which I want to follow up with something similar to xDubai's suit).
- atrilumen 8y agoSo glad birds don't make that kinda noise.
- archi42 8y agoNice! I wonder if it would be possible to add wings and build a VTOL plane with thrust-vectoring?
- 52-6F-62 8y agoI was wondering the same. Or would external fins/wings defeat the purpose?
- archi42 8y agoWhat's the purpose of this? Seems like "I want to build that" to me. So wings would defeat the primary purpose - but once the initial goal is reached, I personally would give it a shot (for the pure fun of doing it and see if that works, too). Disclaimer: I believe building good wings is not a trivial task; even compared to this awesome rocket.
- cybrjoe 8y agoFixed wing and let the thrust-vectoring pitch it over for forward-flight. Pitch up for SpaceX style landing.
- ansible 8y agoIt's been done with two electric motors. This is the E-flite X-VERT: https://www.horizonhobby.com/efl1800 https://www.horizonhobby.com/efl1800 You can fly it like a regular plane, or hover like a quad. It doesn't do that well hovering in wind though.
- archi42 8y agoBut no trust vectoring :( still looks neat.
- dbatten 8y agoThe YouTube codec did some wild stuff with that slow-mo flying mulch at the beginning... any video experts around that can explain?
- vizzier 8y agoTom Scott did a video on this very subject with a decent amount of depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI
- dimitriarendt 8y agoI had a similar project on Kickstarter. https://youtu.be/xRviasOMCvk https://youtu.be/xRviasOMCvk We made 300k$ but then dropped the project and gave money back to backers. Basically beyond the "damn cool" effect there is no edge over quadcopter. It is less efficient. You gain something by the duct effect but the duct is heavy. It is very noisy. More sensitive to wind, especially when you try to reduce weight to make something affordable to build and sell. The only benefit was safety due to ducted fan but the point vanishes against mini drone the size of your hand like latest dji. But for sure it s dann cool and fun tech to master. Kudos!
- madeuptempacct 8y agoThis is really cool. I find it very strange that it's less efficient though.
- georgeecollins 8y agoI believe it is because propellers get lift from air pressure, which is more efficient than just pushing air for thrust. If you are sucking air through an engine you don't get that bernoulli effect. I could be wrong. I am not an aerospace engineer
- dimitriarendt 8y agoThe efficiency of a propeller depends on the ratio thrust/area, the smaller this ratio the higher the efficiency. (See 11.7.3 at https://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes/node86.html https://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes...) The issue with the ducted fan is that the propeller size is constrained and the weight is higher due to the mechanical structure. A small quadcopter has twice or more propeller area for a portion of the weight.
- georgeecollins 8y agoThanks! I learned something from this.
- p1mrx 8y agoThis almost looks like the original App Engine logo.