Tried just for fun to start and land with my Wingcopter in the forest :)
Here is the onboard video:
To see the whole VTOL here one picture:
It is the first Wingcopter of our serial production. The tilt arms are redesigned and more stable than at the earlier version. On our website there are some more pictures of the new one:
http://www.wingcopter.com/html/fotos.html
Regards,
Jonathan
It´s been two months since we posted our first flight report; time for an update!
Here's what we've been up to:
As you may have seen on Chris Anderson's Blog, our Wingcopter now uses the APM2.5. The agility and stability seems much better compared to the old APM1.0.
Above is a video of one of the longer flights, including some maneuvers:
When there´s no wind, the wingcopter performs just as expected/commanded. However, in turbulent air the flap's control commands are still slightly too extreme. It wobbles a little bit. In order to solve this problem, we'll have to play with our PID Parameters again.
In last report's comment section, there where some question concerning flight maneuvers. As a result, we tried out to tail sitting and landing as a conventional plan.
Tail sitting is possible, but it´s not as easy as we initially thought it would be.
We tried to land in "conventional plane mode" at the end of this video
and this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SyScUKdqH8
slightly harder landing than intended ;)
We also tested the maximum payload. After a couple of increases, we tried a 636g beer bottle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCZO6b1MROc
At this level of payload, the plane is harder to control, especially if there's a certain amount of wind (like in the video). So far, we would prefer up to 400g of payload, as the plane's behavior changes very little compared to flights without any payload.
We hope your enjoyed our little report.
Regards
Andy and Jonathan
PS: our wingcopter is now available on our website!
In order to keep you guys updated on the project's development, I'm happy to present our first flight report!
Andy and his "tripod mop"; Jonathan conducting pre-flight-tests.
The weather conditions were decent: not all that much wind, clear sight and no random short-lived rainfalls.
As we weren't exactly convinced of last video's quality (shaky camera syndrome anyone?), we decided that this had to change. Voilà, enter the floor mop. Although rather unconventional, it makes for a surprisingly useful tripod!
The flight itself was as we had hoped: the wingcopter responded well, the handling was easy.
During the first section the tilt-angle was set at 90 degrees. In the second one we flew with a 45 degree angle. Both configurations performed as expected and without any problems.
Some of you might have noticed a difference in the tilt-angles between the two arms in the latter stages. The reason was one of the nuts deciding to bail, resulting in one of the arms not being fully fixed anymore. We only noticed after the flight though, apparently someone up there seems to like the project as well xD
Slight disbelief, that was a close one! Memo to selfs: Better fix them with some glue.
In order to provide a close-up look at the tilting mechanism in action, we made another video.
We hope your enjoyed our little report, we are planning to do them regularly from now on. Feel free to tell us if you liked this one and if you have any suggestions regarding improvements.
Regards,
Andy and Jonathan
More information on wingcopter.com
We had our first fully tilted flight:
More information on wingcopter.com
