Comment by u4eake on January 22, 2013 at 8:42am

Nice work guys !  

You may also wanna check out the work of some engineering students of the KULeuven : kuleuven-materials-engineering-students-design-multicopters

From what I can see this looks like  a frame designed for vtol, but with airfoils for fast forward flight.  How is the forward flight going (and the transition from hoover to FF?)  I would very much like to see a video of that.

Keep up the good work !

Comment by Ruud Knoops on January 22, 2013 at 10:22am

At this point we are able to do a fully horizontal flight, making and editing a video of that as we speak and will uploaded in the coming days. The speed of which it can go in horizontal cruise (with optimal performance) is 70 km/h. The maximum speed however is 90 km/h. 

If you go into our video archive (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_kSPeLjEWQ), you can see a previous generation, the 4th generation (ATMOV4), do a transition to the FF. Keep in mind that this video is 8-9 months old. 

These videos above are all manual controlled but the really cool thing is that it can function completely autonomously, including the transition from hoover to FF: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIyigYQQnnQ , this was the 2nd generation (ATMOV2) (Notice that it wen't wrong a couple of times because of the engineers best friend -> DUCT TAPE! all over the thing :-D) Again, this video is 8-9 months old.

Right now we have the ATMOV5, which has an other structural design wrt its predecessors. Thus we need to tune it first in forward flight modus with a computer and for that we need a BIG open space, so in the coming months we will be travelling to a military base to tune the forward flight and when that is done, then the ATMOV6 can also operate complete autonomously.

I am wondering, for the KUL project, which autopilot did you gave them and what was the timeframe given to them? But I think its a good thing to get hands-on experience on multirotors during the time on the university! Which is something that TUDelft promotes continuously :-)

Comment by u4eake on January 22, 2013 at 2:37pm

The students used a KK board and the timeframe they had was 10 weeks.  

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