From Hack-a-day. This ducted-fan beast uses the Sparkfun 6DoF IMU that Jordi wrote the software for. No, it hasn't flown yet.
Behold the Land-Bear-Shark, a quadcopter on a rather grand scale. At a full eight kilograms it’s an easy target to compare the [Howard Hughes] behemoth, but in addition to the weight, this still has yet to make its first flight.
To give you some scale to the image above, the board at the center is an Arduino. It controls the beast, along with the help of a SparkFun IMU board which rides atop. Really, if any quadcopter of this size has a chance of working, this should be the one. The construction is beautiful, making use of carbon fiber rod along with 3D-printed connectors to assemble the frame. A lot of thought has gone into small things like conserving weight used on the landing gear, which are incorporated into the bottom corner brackets. The batteries are connected in a manner that makes them easy to adjust, acting as ballast for balancing the craft.
Comments
Also, it would be very hard (and heavy) to find/create motor drivers with enough oomph to rapidly change the speed of a EDF that size.
These are just some of the reasons it's very hard to make rapid changes to the speed of a larger rotor, and that's why most rc helis and all real helis use variable-pitch rotors.
@Ita, but why does the size of the quad matter when it comes to the speed of response? If everything is bigger (i.e props, motors, frame) won't it act just like a normal sized quad?
I don't think he's going to get anywhere near the required control bandwidth from a fixed vector, fixed pitch quad.
In my mind, a larger quad will only be viable with either variable-pitch rotors, control surfaces, or full-on vector thrust capabilities...
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