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Swashplateless MAV mode for Arducopter

Posted by Alexis Read on January 21, 2016 at 1:13pm

Hi everyone!

So, I was quite excited by this Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), and wondered how easy it would be to recreate in Arducopter:

Details can be found at:

http://modlabupenn.org/underactuated-rotor/

As far as I can see, they built their own custom ESC and added a magnetic encoder for the rotor-position sensing. Assuming that Arducopter can use optical coders for the sensing, you'd need to program a function for the ESC, which produces the motor voltage adjusted through the pwm signal.

Is this something which can be done easily with Arducopter? 

I confess I've not looked through the code yet, but I'd like to know if it's feasable (and any pointers would be helpful!) before embarking on a lot of potentially unfruitful work.

I'd love to be able to get one of these babies flying!

Thanks in advance

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Tags: mav, arducopter, coaxial, swashplate
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Replies

  • Mauricio Bailey September 15, 2019 at 8:12pm

    I too wish to build this project, but I wouldn't even know where to get started. I understand how it works, but programming it and putting it together seems too much. Please let me know if you find some page or blog with instruction on how to build this thing.

  • Rob_Lefebvre January 21, 2016 at 1:35pm

    I have look at this concept, but there are some big questions about it's viability.  I'd like to see demonstration of it's performance in turbulent air.  The problem is that, blade flapping is used to actuate controls, but sometimes the blade flap comes from external forces.  Since you don't have direct control over those dynamics, you might not be able to control the rotor outside of the laboratory.

    • Alexis Read > Rob_Lefebvre January 22, 2016 at 1:45pm

      Hi Rob,thanks for replying, and that's a good point, and one of reasons I'm interested in making one.

      A quick back of the envelope calculation using numbers from http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wind-load-d_1775.html gives 0.067N / cm^2 for a 28m/s wind speed, so around 0.134N on the rotor cross section.

      A certain percentage of the thrust/torque will be directed to the blade flap, I don't know how much, but if we say 15% of the 1N thrust that is 0.15N then it will just about work in the wind.

      I'm not an aeronautics engineer, but my guess is that it'll be no worse than a coax copter, and if you up the motor power it should fly.

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