Looking at the submissions, you will see a nice blend of concepts ranging from pure aircraft design to more user and application focused proposals. You can actually be a part of the selection process by going to the LM platform between June 6th and 16th to vote for your favorite concept!
Here a few of my favorite, non-derivative, original submissions:
Starting with a friendly, approachable, multi-purpose Cargo Drone, POD
look, it even has a pair of cute eyes!
This Crazy, most-probably-invalid-but-still-elegant, Design
Andromeda (disclaimer: totally not a spy drone!)
And finally Airbus Engineers' dream design :) it does remind me of a boring but functional chameleon!
I bet 50K, of my currency of choice, this last one or its equally German sibling is going to win the grand prize :) Let's see! It must have been a fun journey for all the participants and organizers.
P.S.: feel free to build a prototype of any of these designs or others on the challenge page, LM has a very community friendly license for this purpose as long as you don't use the designs commercially.
Comments
I think like Rob, that a helicopter still is the best known solution to the VTOL efficiency problem.
Hi,
Their QuadCruiser is like a 2 kg drone, the designs in this challenge are 25 kg drones, not quite the same things. But yes, ultimately, this is publicity, just like the e-fan.
This is my design :
https://localmotors.com/Alexis_K/speedquad/
What do you think of classic vs tandem config plane for VTOL?
@John, If you go to LM and see Airbus employees' conversations with contestants, you will probably change your opinion on that. Even if it were for publicity (which btw they didn't get that much of) it would still be very brave and forward thinking-ish of AB to engage in sth like this! My personal opinion :)
So in other words they wanted publicity..
@Rob your point reg. safety is well taken. I shared your feedback with POD's designer, we came up with an idea to address the stability and CG issues as well as safety. I'll post the 2nd revision here later.
About the challenge limitations, I think they (Airbus) wanted to make sure that they can, with the support of Local Motors, actually make a prototype of what comes out of the challenge. Initially the idea of the challenge was to only allow development of different cargo applications (open ideation) which was then expanded to the drone itself.
Airbus already has a functioning platform (QuadCruiser) so I guess they didn't want to venture too far out of their comfort zone. Plus, one can argue that for certain scenarios SLT VTOL UAVs are the way to go!
NiMA, I'm not sure why you'd design the aircraft around physical safety constraints when this would be much better, and must more easily handled with the electronic systems. To design the aircraft with the propellers in a "less exposed" location, is just inviting people to approach the aircraft when it is still powered. The safest thing to do, is to design the system around the concept that people won't interact with the vehicle unless it is electrically "safed".
If it really is supposed to be mechanically safe, then this isn't good enough. You would need shrouds around the props, increasing weight an decreasing performance even more.
Martin, yes, backward sweep would help the airplane CG situation, but still not going to make the multirotor flight work.
Giovanni, I agree, I really don't understand why they hamstrung the competition like this right from the start. Why not just define the range/duration/speed/payload requirements, and let the best aircraft win? A helicopter still outperforms all of these airplane systems.
@martin makes sense. Will test this on OpenVSP to see the effect on CG. It still remains a bit tricky for the hover mode.
The requirement of at least 5 engine (and propulsio/hover separation) made no sense at all, imho.
A simple and much more effective tilt wing with just 2 engines (as dhl) and probably many other 2/3 engine configuration is a far superior solution.
Many of the things they designed in this contest is good just to be a cool prop in a low budget, sci-fi movie.
Rob had definitely got a point here. Looking at the POD artwork, it seems that the wings have a bit of forward sweep which would move the stable CG region forward compared to an unswept wing. If the wing had >=15 deg of backwards sweep then the current CG position might be ok.
Thanks for the feedback, again, I'm not the designer but the idea was to keep potentially hazardous parts of the UAV (basically the large props) away from the user during interaction with the drone. For a delivery drone, unlike RC or commercial drones, the user could be any untrained person who can not be expected to know how to safely deal with a dangerous machine. That's why all the props are caged inside the drone. In a nutshell it was a UX/safety centric design choice.
In addition to being unsafe, putting those large props (~30 inch) in front of the wings will disrupt the clean airflow and cause rather significant parasitic drag.
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