hello all!

My name is Brandon and i am a student in la hoping to put together a simple but reliable quadrotor for a research project this summer. I have been flying rc helis for a couple years now and have gotten intimately familiar with the variable-pitch setup. After flying a few novelty 'toy' quadrotors i was left impressed with how easy it was to fly but quite unimpressed with the overall maneuverability of the craft

here are my goals for the build and the research project:

Super Stable AND maneuverable-we are going to be mounting a camera setup on top of the copter. As a result, I am hoping to put together a large, super stable platform. I am working on getting my 6 axis imu working properly and would like to take advantage of the sensor package's speed with hardware that can respond quicker than simply an rpm change. Ideally, the craft would go into a "throttle hold" while hovering where all the motors maintained an appropriate rpm and only minute changes were made to the pitch of the blades to keep the platform stable and prevent drift.

Larger Payload- I hope hoping to carry along a bunch o' batteries and a pretty extensive electronics suite for autonomous, vision-guided navigation.

Initial technical thoughts:

1) I want to minimize the moment of inertia as much as possible by moving the motors to the middle of the quad and run belts or shafts to the blades.
2) All electronics including motor controllers and a propeller micro controller are going to be implemented on a custom controller board
3) will contain a 6-axis imu and gps for stability
4) I would like to use brushless motors with an attached planetary gearbox for maximum torque.

I'm having a really hard time finding tail units. I'm looking for something similar to the unit below but it needs to be LIGHT!!! Originally I was considering a two-bladed design, but after some research I'm not sure If it would produce the trust I'm hoping for.

Please provide some feedback-I'm all ears.

thanks!

-Brandon