Is THIS the Most Versatile Aircraft Design? (Forward Flight Testing) - Part 2 

New channel motto: Fly It Till You Crash It

Builds full size human carrying one: throws up during take off

One way of avoiding the vertical surface which provides no lift but adds drag would be to switch to a quad-rotor design. If instead of spacing the wings 120º apart, you space them 60º, 120º, 60º, 120º you'd end up with kind of a biplane configuration in forward flight, with all wings providing lift. As a Bonus it would look like a bit like an x-wing :D

I do wonder how efficient 'spinning while in horizontal flight' might be on this! it would definetly be interesting to see

If you started a business of selling kits for building these with instructions, I would totally buy it! I love drones and this one looks like it's a lot of fun. Keep it up man! You're awesome!

As a student studying aerospace engineering this is one of the coolest and most inspiring videos pertaining to what I’ve chosen to study. Please continue pushing this boundary, you’re doing incredible work.

Wow. Essentially you've created the T-16 Skyhopper, like the kind I used to bullseye womprats in when flying through Beggar's Canyon back home. Amazing that the triangle design can work flying forward like that.

Something that could help with the drawbacks of symmetric wings could be to add flaps that could be angled down symmetrically during forward flight and with rotationally symmetry during spinning hover. You could also add a tail to help keep the craft parallel to the ground during forward flight. This is a really cool concept

Have you considered maintaining the spin in horizontal flight? That would allow asymmetric wings for improved lift in both hover and forward flight.

As you were going through all the different applications of the drone you built, I just got more and more excited about this project. Please continue this series, as I would love to see the camera and 3d scanning versions!

Watching this build develop has been so rewarding. I love where this project is at and enjoy seeing all the use cases that have been discovered. Bravo.

You can counter the spin with a 4th propeller spinning the opposite direction either on top, or under the central body. Also if you modify the 3rd vertical wing, (or all 3, so that 2 are wings, and the third folds back to create a sort of tail) to fold back at the axis pivotal point, when it shifts into its horizontal flight mode, you'll reduce drag even more as the 3rd "wing" could become more of a tail, where the 3rd propeller could function as either a small tail wing, or if turned on, I believe will help to shift the Pitch of the aircraft.

Spinning VS traditional forward flight efficiency was kind of surprising. Absolutely amazing work you done here including your video editing/creating skills, thanks for sharing. Crashing is sort of mandatory when embarking this kind of endeavor!

I love this design, but most of all I love that you've taken it so far. Lots of experimental drone concepts don't get beyond the proof of concept or gimmick phase, but this is already so much further along and shockingly usable. Very excited to see where it goes. Also, have you given any thought to potential folding mechanisms for the wings to enable some sort of transition to a bi-wing during forward flight, or some other configuration that would at least allow the top wing to convert to a lifting surface? I can imagine the complexity and weight of mechanisms like that would be too great to be worth it, but I can almost imagine that there might be a sweet spot or very creative way of accomplishing it in a way that's efficient.

incredible video quality, well done man!

What a cool concept. Two thumbs up!!

This is so cool.

what about a 4 wing design that flies forward like an x wing so all surfaces contribute to lift?

Amazing Dude! Outstanding work 👏

What happens if you spin the drone in forward flight? Does that just not work? Your solution to being able to control the hover would probably be similar to allowing the whole drone to spin in forward flight. You would have to vary the speed of the props depending on what point in the overall prop rotation they are in...this would be very complicated, but also very cool.

Have you flown it in a "Y" orientation in forward flight? Any major difference from the "λ" orientation? I would imagine it would be more inherently stable.

This is just so cool. Well done.

Excellent video. The presentation of the information was straight forward and well presented.

The spinning hover could also be good for non-visable optical or radar sensing. Lots of times it's way cheaper to get point and line sensors for odd optical frequencies.

Your ingenuity is awesome man! Keep these coming! Would love to see how you solve the problem of position control while spinning!

Super smart designs all around! Excellent work!

Been watching this project for quite some time, so amazing 🤩. Keep up the incredible work!

That's a fantastic project! Here's something I noticed. As is during forward flight your two bottom 'wings' are oriented in a way which creates anhedral. As well, the vertical surface raises the center of gravity higher, thus contributing to lateral imbalance. I'm thinking if you were to program it to fly with that middle wing facing down, the flight controller won't have to fight balance issues because you now have a lower center of gravity and dihedral.

these ideas are super cool! loving where this project is going

Beautiful work

That's a pretty cool design. Good Job!

Would it be feasible to make one of the fixed wings actuate and lay back at 90 degrees during forward flight to reduce drag?

I Love the Idea Of using it's spinning with the Lidar and Having it scan it's surrounding And Map out area's Like it could be used for Noticing small Batches of Spreading wild fired where there's decent Wind defusing or moving the smoke so it could fly and scan the edge constantly Drifting with the fire so it's easier to block or Stop or Burn grass in front of it so it can't spread as much Exct!

This was very well done

One of the coolest flying machines Ive ever seen. DIY!!! Amazing buddy!

Maybe a possibility to increase efficiency is to have separately angled wings. So forward flight you can increase / decrease the lift and keep the props more in a level state.

Would love to see you develop this more.. maybe until it reaches the state of being an actual signal repeater drone that you can demonstrate out in the field. Very nice work, keep it up!

Very good concept, something I haven't seen before. Keep up the good work and research.

Awesome, Terrific Design, CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!

It'd be interesting to plot range vs. flight time for the different modes. Fixed wing flight will probably give you better range, and you know that the endurance is best in the spinning mode. There might be a sweet spot where you can travel further in fixed wing mode, then transition for a long-endurance loiter. If designed for a particular application, it could be extremely effective!

Well done sir, good pacing great context well spoken . Cheers.

Wow, this is an incredible concept and cleverly implemented. I have one suggestion for improving energy efficiency during forward flight that would hopefully have little or no impact on spinning hover efficiency and potentially better non-spinning hover. And that would be a four wing configuration with two long wings and two short wings, each with a thruster. During non-spinning hover, if you use the same propeller and motor combination you will have four rather than three props, and thus have a larger disk area, and thus reduced power for a given total thrust. But this will also potentially make the drone heavier, and so that would require more thrust. So I am not certain that it will reduce total power compared to your current symmetrical three rotor design. Only design will tell. During spinning hover, the long wings will provide most of the lift while the two short wings will add some. If the total area or at least the wing loading stays the same as the three wing design, I would think that power required for spinning hover will be at least very similar. As with non-spinning hover, if the total weight goes up, then power required could go up. The big change should come during forward flight. The two long wings will be horizontal with their lift vector parallel to the gravity vector and so yield a higher L/D for a given wing area and CL than the Y-wing with the lifting wings at 30 degrees to the horizontal. Also the total area of the two short wings could be less than the one large wing wing that is vertical during forward flight in you Y-wing. The length of the two short wings would be determined by the required moment arm required to produce the necessary pitching moment using differential thrust from the two propulsors on the short wings. Differential thrust on the two long wings would provide the necessary yaw control and differential pitching of the two long wings would provide an awesome amount of roll control. Since pitch is not coming from aerodynamic lift, the area of the two short wings is not a factor and so can be very small. In fact in the limit the wing chord could be just long enough to provide a clean aerodynamic shape around the rods providing the structural strength. In this case lift in spinning hover would come almost entirely from the two long wings. As for your potential applications, I like your idea of providing a relay between widely separated locations on the ground. Another could be between a ground controller and another drone that is operating beyond line of sight. One use could be powerline and pipeline inspection where one drone either flies in spinning hover in line of sight to the controller to provide control relay to the second drone with the camera and/or other sensors flying in horizontal mode along the powerline/pipeline.

Incredibly interesting! Keep it up!

Thirty-ish years ago, when I was in high school, I drew up rough plans for an airplane shaped like this. I never built it, of course, but I was always curious if the idea had any merit. Nice to see someone else had the same idea and the ability to actually build a model to test the concept out.

For forward flight in practice you really want to locate the minimum of energy per distance traveled, not just minimal power (energy per unit of time). It doesn't matter how little power you used if you are still nowhere near the target.

…have you considered flying with the wing geometry (post transition) in the dihedral config rather than the anhedral config? …which means you could utilise the inherent stability and achieve yawl control by thrust vectoring L/R and pitch control with the remaining motor. Also the “video capture while in rotating loiter” problem could be solved electronically for live capture and cranking up the ISO and re-framing the video post flight for post-flight capture. 🤔 Edit: Ops! I forgot, great video BTW. I watched the last one and I was immediately impressed by the elegance of the design, well done. (Be assured there are many applications for efficient drone solutions) PS: The solution to the “rotating control” can best be dealt with by adopting a similar control method to the Cycloidal drone’s control👍😊

YES! Love this stuff!

Nice! Thank you for an interesting vid

You might improve the design further by looking into into a quad prop/arm setup with two larger wings and two shorter stubbier ones.

3:09 just use a 360° action camera. By recording in all directions, rotation can be counteracted when editing the video

So cool aproach and it works!

Smart, love it, great work

Fascinating! This merits more research!

I am glad I found your videos :) Showing and explaining the math calculations is the best part!

Dude, I can only say....this is too cool! I think you have hit on a great idea and further exectution for a new multipurpose airborne vehicle! So many uses for this!! Keep the vid's coming! I wanna see what you do next! Cheers!

Very nice design and video!

This is the coolest and does so much for re modernizing drone flight and I see air travel potential as well.

Cool and innovative!!

I clicked like in the first 2 seconds of this Video, because i knew, this will be good! Exelet work!

Dude, you're a legend!

Amazing! Ty 4 sharing

Rescue concept is Brilliant Lidar !!

Just amazing!

Cool ideas, info, efficiency tests, and VTOLs. Yup, you just earned my subscription. Thanks RU-vid algorithm for making this video pop up in my feed! Really cool stuff! I can’t wait for the video that shows how you fix the rotation drift problem!

Very interesting, thanx!

Thanks for posting the files and so on!👍

Wow! This is amazing Very impressive design.

Here's an idea to test: A quad-blade design, where the top and bottom fins are slightly smaller but still articulated. It should allow for finer control than just two articulated wings with propellers, while still having the stability and efficiency of spinning hover.

Very very nice work!!!!

Man this looks AWESOME.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the follow up video, just an amazing piece of work. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍🏻😃

I love this desing so much

Very cool video!

Awesome video!

WoW! What a great video

Sir, this is AMAZING such cool idea!

Nice innovation. Congratulations 🎉

Outstanding !

absolutely wicked !!

It looks really cool.

Keep up the good work. I like your idea of a cell repeat for rescue missions and the mapping function.

great stuff!

Es una obra de arte. Felicitaciones.

Dude this is awesome

Great video! Love that you actually have something useful and quite efficient already in this non-refined stage. In terms of forward-flight efficiency, I think the better measurement would be power per meter flown (or mile). Then you can compare that to the power-per-distance of a regular drone and maybe a bi-wing. It will definitely be in the middle between those two, but I'd love to see how much more efficient it would be than a normal drone. This, I think, is essential to the overall usefulness of this forward-flight mode because as you mentioned, the forward-flight mode would probably be used in a scenario where we want to fly as efficiently (and fast) as possible to a certain location.

You convinced us all subscribe with your promise of how easy it is film while spinning. I'm really looking forward to see how you do that !

This is amazing

Impresionante!! Por más proyectos así!! 👏👏👏

Good job, most interesting.

Best Drone design I have ever seen. Logical.

Cool! Love this

you sir just earned a new subscriber. awesome.

Magnificent.... subbed.

Cool project.

Brilliant!

Very cool idea! I think to "finish" and make it do everything you'll need to install a fixed pod in some fashion. Either by slip ring or some other connection to a de-rotated portion, the value of even a small de-rotated section would really enable the entire thing to work across all regimes.

Simply amazing work man. Everything down to the 3D printed cone on the front that attaches with magnets! Genius!

the emergency mesh network application is a fantastic idea! amazing aircraft, well done!

Pretty cool!