Hi all,
I am new to the community and a co-founder of Skyborne Technologies. We are a Australian based R&D Startup developing hybrid UAV platforms.
Our UAVs are all based on Tri-Tilt Rotor designs. We recently have decided to develop a hobbyist platform that is different to current quad copters on the market. We want to provide more of a 'pilots eye' flying experience and having the additional agility and maneuverability from a tri rotor, eventually allowing more experienced users to do aerobatic stunts.
I know there is a lot of quadcopters being developed and sold these days, but I wanted to make this discussion based on the communities opinion based around Tri copters.
Our upcoming in development product Cerberus RC, that will target hobbyist pilots, can be viewed here: Skyborne Technologies - Cerberus RC
The current information available on our consumer development is limited, but happy to answer questions from the community.
We do appreciate your honest opinion as this will help bridge or un-bridge a gap between quadcopter and tri copter UAVs.
Thanks,
Adrian
Replies
All,
Your opinion and feedback is value for our development of Cerberus RC - The 'Pilot Eye' of the sky.
If you would not like to express your honest opinion on the forums, we do have a survey that can be filled out. It can be found at the bottom of our products page.
Skyborne Technologies - Cerberus RC
Thanks all for the comments so far.
Zero interest in the copter version, but if the plane version could do waypoints and was available at a price I could afford I'd buy one today.
Thanks for the feedback Col. Our combination of fixed and multi copter model 'Chimera' will initially be aimed for commercial use. As mentioned previously, an add on wing kit will possibly be designed for the hobbyist model.
Interesting, I have recently added support for tri-copter tiltrotors and tilt-wings in the QuadPlane code for ArduPilot. See this code which does simple tiltrotor compensation.
https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/blob/master/ArduPlane/tiltro...
How far fwd do you tilt the motors in flight? For a quadplane you can go all the way to 90 degrees as the wing gives you roll stability once you gain speed, but for a tricopter I imagine you'd need to keep it quite low.
it would be nice to add servo position feedback from hall effect based servos, they are very affordable these days and work great. there is a cleanflight fork called triflight it incorporates servo position feedback into the controll loop to decouple roll and yaw which is inherently present in all tilt rotor setups.
it is a simple adc input as far as I know.
Hi Andrew,
Glad to see other tri-copter developers. The engineers are still developing/designing and can provided limited information as of yet.
Would love to learn more about your developments.
Thanks
Adrian
you can read a bit more about what I'm up to here:
http://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/tiltrotor-support-for-plane/8805
i've added support for arbitrary tiltrotors in the SITL simulator. There was a very interesting effect with a quadcopter with the fwd two motors tilting that required the front right motor to be clockwise and front left anti-clockwise (so opposite to normal quad-x frame). For tricopters it doesn't matter.
This tiltrotor code is only for quadplanes so far, but I wouldn't be surprised if ArduCopter gets tiltrotor support sometime soon.
Thanks Andrew, looks like an exciting project. There seems to be a lot of focus around quad copters, I think tri copters will provide a difference once development gets over stability issues.
What are the FireflyY6 like?
Hi James,
Thanks for the feedback and subscribing your interest.
So far the flight controller is custom made Gumstix & Atmel with Analogue devices IMU, but looking to move to Raspberry pi and Navio.
We have a design that adds the wings for the added endurance. You may view this on our R&D page at http://skybornetech.com/randd/
With Cerberus RC we intend develop an add-on wing kit for consumers to purchase.
Let me know if you have any questions
Thanks
Adrian