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
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Comments
Very impressive work and your idea.
You mean like the Panther from IAI?
Have you thought about using three motors? or even two..
We plan to test some more maneuvers in the next flights. One of them will be to look how slowly it flies and what it is doing during stall. I want to test the gliding skills too. Vertical flight like a tailsitter is at the moment not possible. The wingcopter is all the time in the stable mode. The switch to acro mode is not integrated yet but of course planned.
I look forward to future flight reports. Do you intend showing advanced manoeuvres such as stalls and vertical flight in the tilted config like a tailsitter?
Maybe it would be simpler to have only one single boom at each side. But in that case you have more drag during forward flight because there is more vertical boom length in the airstream.
@Tom: Yes, the FC is mounted in the fuselage and we have one channel devoted for the tilting mechanism. But that's not all. For a stable transition there are added in the code some calculation dependent on the tilt angle too.
This is a really valuable contribution.
I can imagine that you have a channel devoted to the tilt mechanism and that you have the FC mounted on the wing itself. Are there other customizations made to the code to assist in the transition from hover to aerodynamic flight?
In the horizontal flight it should have less load on the motors so the battery life must be longer. I haven´t proved the amp draw yet. But it is a very interesting question! It will be one more testing target on our To Do List :)
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