I've been following the development of this new aircraft concept. It's a revolution in so many fronts, I can't even imagine all the real world applications. Never fails to impress me.
Exactly, for example I can see this thing used for extended periods of flight time to provide an emergency area with communications, Acting like an antenna like Nicholas said.
"This New Aircraft Concept" literally means "Tip Jet" from approx 1911. Now it is 111 years old. In fact, this is a passed stage in the evolution of helicopter industry. The author is a very good engineer, and I enjoy watching his channel, but it's better not to claim that he reinvented the wheel. sry for my bad english
What a fantastic video. There’s so many unspoken things that you know doubt thought about but did not put in the video that I find to be amazing. To what effect does gyroscopic precession play in? How significant is the lag associated with spinning up the propellers in phase like that? I assume propeller inertia is important, and the angle of attack of each individual motor would affect how much drag/lift is on the propeller. What is the power efficiency of hovering in the different modes? On top of all of that, the sneaky rolling shutter effect propeller shadows against the LEDs. This video is set my mind on fire. Thank you so much for making it.
Thanks so much for the kind words, Destin. “Mind on fire” and discovering all the new questions to ask is exactly what I was going for!! I think you’d like the first two videos in this series covering the efficiency benefits + some cool potential applications. Cheers
I'm new to your channel, but as a retired aerospace engineer I can say that what you're doing here is engineering at its finest. Your skill set, from aerodynamics to control theory, is amazing. And your spinning drone is brilliant. One item I would like to know more about is your neighbors' reaction to all that goes on in your backyard. Perhaps an interview segment on one of your next videos?
@@dohabandit the shutter speed would need to be extremely fast in order to acquire good images. Doing this at night, or even just in the evening would certainly result in bad images. But I think on a bright enough day, you might actually get something cool.
@@NicholasRehm couldnt you put cameras with the LEDs on each tip? And use the same logic as the code for the LEDs to switch inputs on the camera, except maybe do processing off-drone in a phone app or something using live gyro data from the drone? If you only grabbed a frame at each time the camera is in front, That could give you 12.5 fps from my crappy math. (250rpm, times three cameras, divided by 60 to get rps) and you could potentially play around with wide-angle to get 2 frames slightly off center and merge them, for 25 fps, that could be usable. Or, a 360 cam in the center, or front and back center cams for two frames each spin.
@@Av-vd3wk I will. It rings a bell tho, maybe it's the talk I'm thinking about, in which case it was super cool yes, especially considering it was many years ago.
@@NicholasRehm you should try putting a stabilizer on a camera so it doesn’t spin, so you can go fpv. I think a thing the middle of an monowheel could work
I vote for the X-wing design! Awesome how you explain complicated stuff in short and comprehensive way and don't shy away from showing a little math. Cool!
More than an X-wing this is actually quite simmilar to the Babylon 5 fighters and it looks fire :P ... but apart from the engine loss thing I can´t really see it being more efficient than the two wing "plane". We moved away from biplanes for a reason and the helicopter mode would suffer as well.
Beautiful work! Making the hub a hollow ring/stator, with a counterrotating core/armature, should give you a stationary mount for a POV camera without a fuselage. You could probably make a 360-degree camera work as well, if you can fly enough computing power for the stitching/distortion processing. In either case, you'll probably need additional stabilization code to take the wobbles out of the video feed. I'm really looking forward to seeing where you take this next!
@@The-KP They're talking about FPV flight I think, so in that case you'd indeed want to do it in real time. It still doesn't necessarily have to happen on the drone though
The 360° camera might be a little wonky due to how fast the thing is rotating. These cameras aren't magic - they're still susceptible to motion blur and rolling shutter jell-o. I expect the video feed to be a stable but blurry mess. Putting the camera on a rotating platform shouldn't be too terrible. I think you only really need a small motor to counter the rotation - the camera platform wants to preserve its (zero) rotational momentum so you only need to counter friction in the bearing and in the motor itself. Then, since FPV and recording gear usually don't need to talk to the main flight controller, you just need two slip rings for power. As long as your yaw ring motor is on the top half, you can put any standard camera gimbal on the bottom half and it should work.
@@NicholasRehm can I suggest 2 short blades and 2 longer blades. Mount the motors on the short blades and use them as balances like you would find on a helicopter. This gives you a efficiency advantage of spinning your craft faster?? follow this up with a free swiveling tail to mount your camera?? I love what you have done and I am only brainstorming ! Really looking forward to the next episode!!!!!
You can find the free 3D print files and complete parts list for this vehicle here: hackaday.io/project/186410-the-cyclone-rotor-drone My only ask is that you support the channel in one way or the other--subscribing, sharing the video, or just spreading the word about what I'm doing helps out a ton!
I'd consider trying to put a 360 camera on it and have that downstreamed to the FPV, and then stabilized and displayed in an FPV display pointed in the direction the controls are based on. That should be able to deal with the spinning... assuming the framerate is fast enough to deal with motion blur.
I think it would be easier to use the speed of the motor and find a gear ratio that cancels out the rotation of the drone like an inverted turntable. The motion blur would be a huge limitation I'd guess
@@eftorq Using the existing motors definitely wouldn't work, for three reasons - - The speed of the motors isn't necessarily proportional to the speed of rotation - The mechanism would be ridiculously heavy, especially with the existing blade tilt mechanism - Most importantly - you actually want one more degree of freedom to be able to turn the camera. Otherwise, the "front" would drift over time and you wouldn't be able to control it. Perhaps a more sensible solution is a "static" camera platform that can rotate independently of the main chassis, and has its own stabilization motor (which can be located on the main chassis)
@@antonliakhovitch8306 I'd have imagined you can calculate the rotation speed because you know the angle of the props, thrust and resistance of the "wings" etc. But you are right, I'm probably overcomplicating the problem!
Really awesome stuff man. Can't wait to see what the next iterations look like. There is a simplicity to this idea that belies all the ingenuity you put into it. Really great job!
Have you thought of sticking a 360 camera in the center/bottom of the drone instead of a gimbal? The camera could in theory counteract the rotating motion while shooting. You can even split the camera into two separate lenses and put one atop the drone and one in the bottom. Giving you an uninterrupted video bubble (the drone would be invisible to the camera)
Man, I kept reaching for the like button only to find I already pressed it, this is a great video demonstrating a complicated problem and solution I'm never going to get to experience myself in any other way, and I love it.
In case of 3 motors failure, the drone gains velocity in free fall and then pitches the blades to start yawing. When the yawing velocity is high enough, the wings pitches in reverse to turn from turbine to propeller and slow down withe kinetic energy harvested
This is so innovative and so creative. keep doing these amazing projects. I would love to see more vids of this concept. It is so interesting and solves a lot of problems in the most unique ways.
it's exactly the meltybrain concept in a multirotor, honestly. control mixture of each mobility drive/thruster by angular position against a reference axis: that's meltybrain, babyyy
This video introduced me to your content and I have been watching all your other videos. This channel is killer and I'm excited to see what stuff you do next.
First of all, you are awesome! Transitional flight is the future of eVTOL, it would be cool to see some of those tri or X wing designs you were talking about at the end.
I look forward to seeing some actual flights with what I'm calling The Hurlcopter. It would be cool to see how much (and how much more) weight it can carry in its modes.
I’ve watched all the typical many-propeller-no-redundant-lift drones and the insane scaling of them up into proposed human taxis and wondered why people would even consider that remotely sane: grossly inefficient relying 100% on small high-speed propellers (a lot of mass spun for the lift) that, if there is power outage, there is zero glide capacity. The world’s worst helicopter can at least autogyro down at a rate not nearly as likely to kill the passengers (slower fall than a brick with feathers on it) where the “traditional” drone these days, once a motor goes out or a propeller has a bad time, you lose complete control and you fall almost like a badly guided rock. The youTube algorithm somehow guided me here, glad I watched, I’m subscribed now! This is the first hobby drone using typical hobby drone-sized propellers that I’ve seen that had any sort of efficiency and redundancy: your drone is a mad scientist’s cross between the old autogyro and a modern tiny propeller drone, with more flight modes feasible than both of them combined, bravo! I’d consider being a passenger in a scaled-up version of one of these, as opposed to the typical drone, as a result: done correctly, perhaps with a little more work, losing all power this would at least fall softly, for some definition of “softly” of course 😉
I love the design! Especially the forward flight mode. Seems like the spinning mode would be great in the event of a problem so it doesn’t just fall out of the sky if delivering something. If you were able to increase rotation speed of the whole drone I wonder at what point that will emit enough lift as well
What you are doing is important research. The fact that you are doing so in a clear "open source" fashion compounds that value to our society many times, because it draws in curious minds, and demonstrates the potential of applied scientific knowledge. You are also showing young people that in our world of apparent entirely fleshed out ideas everything has not been done yet; that reconfigurations of existent properties combined with the sweat equity of physical research can lead to novel cogent propositions, and fun flying vehicles! Cheers, my friend.
It'd be really interesting to see a dedicated 1-motor version too, like the single blade helicopter. Even if it means you wouldn't be able to use "normal" hover mode. I was seeing another researcher fake FPV mode by having a camera take a single frame as it spins round, just like your LED code, so it seems stationary.
There are a number of monocopter configurations, often with a prop and a flap, but sometimes with just one prop. Usually the prop is pointed sideways, but pointing it almost straight up might have some interesting advantages.
@@NicholasRehm I've love to see one that transitions into flight around the horizontal axis, I've only ever seen one slowly creep sideways while still rotating around the vertical axis. Very excited about future videos!
I have a question/suggestion, Have you thought of using individual rotation for each wing/arm that way Instead of spooling up and down the motors for controlling roll and pitch axis while hovering, you could simply increase and decrease the pitch of each wing/arm to control the roll and pitch axis much like a helicopter and its collective pitch rotor. With a slightly larger centre hub and three servos, each servos would be attached to the hub and then linked to the rotating rods of its respective wing/arm by a bevelled gear, its the same arrangement you have to actuate all three arms but instead of using one servo for all three arms, each arm would have a dedicated servo, with this you could get the same flight behaviour as the collective pitch rotors of a helicopter, with this modification while hovering if you raise or lower the pitch of all the wing/arms together the aircraft should gain or lose altitude, and then if you raise the pitch of one wing/arm and lower the pitch of the opposite wing at the right time while the drone is hovering you should be able to roll the drone to right and left, you should also be able to do the same to pitch the drone forward and backwards, and then you would just spool up and down all the motors at the same time and adjust the pitch of all the wing/arms to maintain altitude in order to control yaw.
Combining this with the normal functioning drone probably is the best of both. A drone helicopter which increases both hoovering as well as forward flight due to the large propeller function ability. Love the increased control with motor failure. Imagine these designs improving actual human flight. Great work.
Have you considered stitching the frames in software to enable FPV without a fixed-frame fuselage? I bet there would be a bunch of people who could help out with the software (myself included) if you need it.
It makes perfect sense when you explain it, but I would never have thought of something like this, not in a million years. You engineers are special, I tell ya. Great video, thanks for the effort on this project.
how sensational this project of yours is, the first thing that made me wonder, imagine a device like this with 3 mini LiDARS, one at each end, doing mapping and being able to carry sensitive equipment that needs instant navigation. it would be amazing
20 years ago a similar aircraft called the "Vectron Blackhawk" was sold on toy shelves. It was very impressive for the time. It had 3 rotors and it spun around like yours. But it's method of control was a bit different. It had an infrared light on top. As the aircraft spun, the transmitter would detect the IR light when the light was facing the transmitter. That gave it the information it needed to know where each rotor was and when to spool them up or down. It had 3 channels of control, forward/backwards, left/right, and up/down. It also had a single vertical strip of LED lights on the outside that would blink as it spun. It was able to spell out words with the LED lights by turning them on and off quickly. You could type in messages that would be displayed on the outside of the aircraft as it spun. It had a wire that went from the transmitter to the aircraft. The wire supplied power and data to the aircraft. It even had landing gear that stayed still while the whole aircraft spun. It was insanely clever and way ahead of it's time. It was before lipos and MEMS gyros and 2.4 ghz transmitters were being used in rc drones. You can still find them on eBay sometimes and a few videos exist online showing them in action. You've advanced the concept in ways that were unimaginable at the time. Your skills, problem solving abilities, and intellect are to be commended. You've created something amazing and I look forward to seeing more from you.
Brilliant solution to the "front" problem. Hope you can get to a point of making more videos more often - your projects and inventions are some of the most interesting ones out there.
So, If you haven't thought of this already, I am thinking multiple cameras. Switch the camera feed like you did the LED's. That may give you FPV. I am also thinking about stitching differing degrees of the right side and the left side of the frames together. Cool project. Looks like a ton of work. Well done!
Great work. The inside stand stuff made me nervous so stay safe on this dev. You know your gear, just hoping you stay safe around all the angry spinny bits!
Swarms of these drones are going to be used for in the sky ads bc they're efficient and the spinning makes it easy to produce images using minimal leds.
Brilliant bit of gear. I'd either forgotten or ignored that pcbway had an injection moulding service. I was actually thinking of something recently where injection moulding would be desirable.
This design shows some incredible promise. I feel like it would sell based off niche design alone. But the motor redundancy is especially impressive. The though of losing all but one motor on a standard drone is death, but this drone is able to safely land with no additional loss. Absolutely amazing!
So cool! I have so many ideas from this! Make the camera counter-spin at the same speed as the arms, and the camera stays stable! Put 2 of these, counterspining, on a Chinook type body, and it could carry an absurd amount of weight, with VTOL and have efficient long distance flight!
Ok as rc helipilot, and an engineer. I’m officially impressed! That thing is wicked, you get so many cool aspects in one aircraft now just need rotating gimbal cockpit for the camera!
If you include an fpv cam with high shutter speed and clever processing you should be able to mesure the rpm and always take a picture at the same orientation, that would be cool
