Is any work being done by the development team to add this class of vehicle to the capabilities of the APM or Pixhawk series of autopilots? The Arcturus design is very nice and looks like a very useful cross between Multi-rotor and normal aircraft designs.
here is a link to their site - http://arcturus-uav.com/index.html
dennis
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For me six hours is the new 40 minutes, we all used to think 40 minutes was ages now much much longer seems very possible with hobby grade platforms, take a bit of work but possible. If you are flying for six hours VTOL is close to pointless, unless you are flying from a small boat.
I don't think the Jump uses the quad part to come into the hover during a mission.
This one does though
Multirotors are in fashion at the minute but they have been around for much longer than folks think and most of the uses that pop up now have been thought about tried and disguarded.
I'm glad you mentioned traditional heli's Rob I think they are always going to beat these hybrids hands down. Its fun to try and make weird stuff fly but beyond that once you actually start wanting to work they make little sense. @Gil Thunderbird 2 was always my favourite. FAB.
Gil, I guess you don't know me well enough if you don't know what I was hinting at. ;) Drum roll please....
Or higher end:
Remember, they look complicated, but this is very mature and reliable technology. I've flown my heli as a 700 electric, but it's currently 600 size. With Arducopter. Benefits from all the same functionality as a multirotor. My 600 lifts a Nex5 on a 3-axis gimbal no trouble at all. I'll be testing flight duration probably this weekend, hoping for 20 minutes. Could probably do 30 with another set of batteries. It still has bags of power.
Gas duration starts at 30 minutes and just goes up from there. Nobody has put a Pixhawk or APM on a gas heli yet, but I'm working towards that. Hoping to do it this summer. Just trying to put together the funding.
i am curious why you guys decided you needed the winglets also?
dennis
rob...
well, just buying them would take most of the fun out of this wouldn't it? can you post the sources of some of these solutions since that is what i really need for the SAR effort instead of some half baked in work development vehicle.
thanks ahead of time.
dennis
Rob...
one more thing. design the three multi-rotor (tricopter) props to incorporate the foldback capability of glider props so when the horizontal flight puller props are in use the three tricopter props streamline to reduce drag.
dennis
Rob....
I think I understand what you are saying. I have been looking at the FireFLY6 -
http://www.birdseyeview.aero/products/firefly6
and your post makes me wonder if the props/engines on that vehicle should be re-engineered. perhaps two of the props on the front two pods should be optimized for normal "airplane" flight and only used for that when the pod is in level flight configuration. perhaps eliminate one of the props at the back since there is no need for a prop back there for horizontal flight. finally, optimize the two remaining props in the front and the remaining back prop for multi-rotor (tricopter in this case) flight. the end result is two puller props in the front optimized for forward flight horizontal flight and three props (tricopter) optimized for VTOL operations. your thoughts?
When I read things like this... What if I told you that you can get an off-the-shelf solution for about $2-3000. It's very mature technology. You have several choices of manufacturers. They can fly for 2 hours easily, at up to 100 km/h. It has excellent VTOL capability, and can hover in almost any wind condition. It can lift up to 20lbs if you want to, but typically would limit to 5-10lbs if you want to achieve the flight duration I mentioned previously. They weigh only about 15lbs, and are only 1.5m long, and 15cm wide. This is available *today*.
All of these proposed new aircraft need to beat those performance metrics to really make sense.
There's actually a lot of misconceptions around the idea of high-pitch props on multirotors. Basically in the early days of multirotors, with low motor efficiencies, lack of availability of purpose-made motors, poor frame designs, poor controller design, etc, Slow Flier props were needed. But those same factors don't exist anymore, and people aren't circling back to look at the science again, or just doing a bad job of that.
There's a guy on RCG... Ferdinand? He's been pushing this stuff, but nobody seems to be listening. He's setting endurance records, with 6" pitch props. And he's got quads that can actually fly 45 minutes, with a payload, and I mean *actually fly* at up to 10-15 m/s or so. He's doing something right.
There's considerable room for improvement here.
I don't have all the answers on this. I'm just saying... the conventional wisdom most people operate with right now isn't it.
For example, most people think that low pitches are required to prevent stalling the blade, because we are effectively operating statically. But you have to remember, that the propeller creates it's own inflow. It doesn't operate statically. That inflow velocity can be quite high, allowing really high pitch props. But an issue arises when you accelerate the propeller too fast, before the induced flow can accelerate, then you can get stall.
Consider for example, the tail rotor on a heli. Most have up to 45° of pitch available. What's the linear pitch of that? Extremely high. But we use them in a static condition. You only run into trouble if you move the pitch too fast, before velocity builds, then you can get stalling. But even then... when you stall the tail rotor, you don't really get in a condition where thrust stops, you just get in a situation where thrust does not rise linearly with power. The tail rotor sucks all this power, but doesn't make tons of thrust. It's still making substantial thrust though.
Sorry, rambling post... Point is just that I think these things can be made to work just fine with fixed pitch props. You just need to engineer the system right.
One more thing....
I really like the idea of a "kit" that can be added onto existing airframes. The "Jump" solution i found that started this thread is just that - a bolt on kit. A whole new technology area would be created that involved design, manufacture, and sale of kits that could turn the MILLIONS of existing rc aircraft into multi-rotor vehicles if the software to control this configuration existed in one simple place. Where better than the ArduPilot community? My guess is the 95% of the software development effort is already done - we just need to accomplish that last 5% and create this "new" class of vehicle to augment plane, copter, rover, ......
GO TEAM!
dennis
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