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Permalink Reply by David Kern on May 8, 2012 at 8:05am

Andrew, I've spent some time studying this design. I believe it is inefficient and excessively complex for its stated mission.
Your analysis is valid - you could control the vehicle with fewer control surfaces. However, using fewer surfaces would result in highly coupled control response.
Pitch/yaw commands would also result in translation. This is controllable, but I would recommend overlaying human commands with a flight control system incorporating feedback loops.
This may save some undesirable weight while introducing additional cost. 

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Permalink Reply by Neal on May 15, 2012 at 7:30am

I've been looking at this too, and it seems like if I had a spare brushless motor and a big slow prop for it, I'd try putting one together from fanfold foam, and then I'd stick my FY20A stabilizer on there and, picturing a 3D plane in place of this sphere (which should control like a 3D plane), if it were in a vertical hover, the FY would be mounted horizontally, such that viewing it as an aircraft it would be tilted "down" 90 degrees in pitch, so that when set to stabilization mode, now it seeks to be happy when the airframe is hanging by the prop, and your rudder translates to your axial roll (which is what you want) and your elevator and aileron inputs perform as pitching the aircraft fwd/rev and tilting left/right.  If I had the parts in front of me, I think I could make it work.  Heck, just take a 3D foamie and mount the FY20A 90 degrees pitched down, set it to stabilized mode, and see if you get a plane that thinks it's a helicopter.  If it does, then a person can invest in building up a spherically-shaped foamie 3D plane, and then we're there.  What's nice, is the FY20A isn't too expensive, so you could probably make this RTF for $200 if you really tried.

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Permalink Reply by Wesley Chuen on May 15, 2012 at 8:15am

At first glance, I thought it was just a co-ax heli.  Now I think about it, since Blade can make a co-ax for under $100, it shouldn't be that hard to make it into a sphere shape and cheap.

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Permalink Reply by Neal on May 15, 2012 at 10:24am

Correction, I meant FY30A module.  With one of those, you could stabilize just about anything.

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Permalink Reply by Imtiyaz on July 10, 2012 at 10:36pm

Hi! I saw that video and I want to make once of those... BTW I am newbie here. I was wondering how hard would it be to make one of these http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCY7DeEmVr4 into a sphere. 

I am willing to spend some time and money to build one but don't know where to start.

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