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Hobbyists have been building building both coaxial thrust-vectored and planar bicopters for years, so as usual the marketing is overwrought. I think the succes
by bri3d 5y ago
Hobbyists have been building building both coaxial thrust-vectored and planar bicopters for years, so as usual the marketing is overwrought.
I think the success and interesting-ness of this depends mostly on the positioning system - the visualizations in the video make it appear to be inside-out, maybe ToF based on the sensor array? If this is good and the pathfinding autonomy is sound, this could be pretty cool in a pretty small niche space.
- Animats 5y ago"Autonomy: Auto position hold, obstacle detection." So, no pathfinding. If it had good pathfinding with no GPS or radio link, it would be an unjammable weapons system.
- littlestymaar 5y agoExactly my thought as well. I actually find it surprising that we haven't seen more assassination attempts using customer-grade drones, I guess the tech isn't quite suitable yet.
- tomarr 5y agoThere has been a few if you monitor the news, mostly unsuccessful (e.g. Iraqi PM a couple of weeks ago)
- leobakerhytch 5y agoSee Slaughterbots [0] for a dramatization of this scenario. [0]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU
- wyager 5y agoHere's an idea I had recently - are you aware if anyone's tried this? An aircraft with coax rotors. Off-axis torque is achieved by changing the angle of the blades independently around the rotor. If thrust vector is in Z direction, and you want to rotate in XZ plane, you increase AoA of rotors in +X direction and decrease AoA in -X direction, causing differential thrust which rotates the aircraft from pointing in Z to pointing more towards -X. Control would probably be via 4 or more cams around the shaft.
- trees101 5y agodo you mean like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra-rotating_propellers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra-rotating_propellers ?
- bri3d 5y agoI think you're describing a collective pitch coaxial helicopter - these exist in full size as well. But by your description, with more fine-grained control than a swash plate, maybe?
- wyager 5y ago> collective pitch coaxial helicopter Yep, that's it! I see some drone videos with exactly what I was imagining. Russian KA-52 looks like full size version. I didn't know about swash plates but that's basically what I had in mind.