Introducing Sprite™
The world's most portable and rugged unmanned aerial vehicle.
Bring it. To Life. All new website is live now at www.ascentaerosystems.com. Follow us on Twitter at AscentUAS for more details on the Kickstarter campaign coming in May.
Comments
Cool you started the Kickstarter. Close to 20% fundings in the first days is great. I am sure your project will be a success. So for others who wan't do support, here's the link to the project at kickstarter:
Sprite at Kickstarter
Thanks for all of the great comments! We're working hard to get the Kickstarter campaign launched. I'd like to take a second and respond to a few comments and questions. (Keep 'em coming!)
As far as price goes, we're still working on the details. As you know, there are a lot of different sUAVs out there, and there are a lot of combinations of DIY, with and without camera, BnF, RTF, ARF...etc. Yet we need to keep the options on Kickstarter as simple as possible...they don't really have a mechanism to do "options" and still keep things simple. That being said, a ready-to-fly Sprite with the standard HD camera and 1-axis gimbal will be in line with comparable designs like the Phantom and Iris. We will be sending out a survey to our mailing list subscribers in the next week or so to get a better sense of what folks are hoping to see.
There were one or two points made about a pendulum-like movement, and quite honestly we'd never noticed anything unusual that would make us give that a thought. Just like flying a conventional quadcopter, changes to the vehicle's orientation are a necessary part of flight...like when giving forward stick to move forward. The gimbal will adjust the camera's view to compensate for that. There are a few designs out there now that have articulating motor mounts, but those seem to be designed to reduce the drag-inducing forward surface area during high speed flight. If I'm not understanding the question fully, please let me know so I can clarify a bit.
About jello. Jello belongs in only one place...in a bowl. (Okay...or in my belly.) Good video footage is why most people buy (or will buy) aerial platforms, and we're committed to making Sprite the very best platform around. It's the focus of our current efforts, and while post-production processing can do a lot to remove jello from footage, we are not going to depend on that for Sprite. What I can tell you is this: all of the aerial footage we have posted has been shot from Sprite without any editing of any kind, and that will be our commitment going forward. We are very aware of previous Kickstarter introductions that did not fully represent what was being shown, and we simply will not do that.
Finally, there have been some questions about landing. Landing gear are optional when operating Sprite. Sprite's rotor brake will stop the blades in less than one second, so at touchdown, they'll be safely tucked in against the airframe before Sprite simply rolls onto its side. Or, you can do this...
Thanks for the interest, keep the questions coming, and fly safe!
Peter, Jon and Nate
Who needs to land? But...yeah...didn't think about that myself.
How does it land?
Ok but how does it work ? Does it rely on moving mass ?
Very cool! Great work.
Can we see any video recorded from the Sprite? Bottom part seems to be wobbling.
I think the fact it flies is impressive but it's honestly soft on video performance. If the camera is mounted at the base there's most certainly a pendulum problem for video stability and seems to be something the author is keen to avoid showing us. Maybe this is released early but it could be promising given the compactness. A 250 Quad isn't that heavy or hard to carry either though.....
Nice project. Good luck!
nice, ive been waiting for this one for a while.
im hoping flight qualities/cameara are ok!
not in wish list yet i guess, :) wait a little longer before throw.
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