Hey guys, this may sound a bit kooky but hear me out. My son was set on towing a kite with a quadcopter... why I'm not sure, but I told him I'd work on it. One potential issue there is the towline getting tangled in the rotors. We are amatuer quadcopter pilots, we have a few inexpensive models that we just play with.
His next thought was to mount a kite to the drone itself, cutting out holes for the rotors and try to adhere the kite material to the body as best we could. I understand this would undoubtably have performance impacts... basically he wants to tether this device to the ground during a windy day and watch it fly as a kite, but also be able to fly it around a little bit as he pleases. We might even be able to design a "tether release" controlled by RC for when he's ready to fly it under power.
I'm willing to put in some effort as long as it isn't totally out to lunch from a control and aerodynamic perspective. It doesn't need to be a super high performance or long battery life drone - IE inefficiency is okay. I've seen asymmetrical drones before, so that is encouraging. What sorts of things should I be thinking about here? Can this be attempted with an off-the-shelf drone? I have never built a quadcopter before but I do have an engineering background so I'd be willing to do a little learning and trial and error.
I ran across this thread: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/nonuniform-geometry-of-a
in which they discuss a non-symmetrical quadcopter design. They mention a mixtertable, so I might need to play with this a bit, especially if strange forces/torques are applied by the kite portion.
Some other folks have mentioned considering a plus configuration, tilting motors, etc. What would you recommend I start reading, and do any ready-made quadcopter platforms come to mind that might be suited to this project?
Thank you,
Eric
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