We are a two-man team that just completed the first major phase of our yearlong APM 2.5 tiltrotor project. We wanted to keep things in the dark until we knew it had potential. Here is a quick summary, but if you’re interested in VTOL aircraft, we’d really like you to read our detailed project summary (attached PDF) and give us some feedback.
Just some of many major accomplishments include:
Design and manufacturing of a tiltrotor on a relatively low budget.
- Utilized many free software applications to make educated design compromises
- Utilized 3D printing to create complex flight control components
- Slow, methodical engineering to identify problems and solutions before first flight
Stable hover with conversion to 23 m/s full airplane flight
- Light hover maneuvering completed in STABILIZE
- Hovering tested in LOITER
- Thrust vector can be set at any intermediate angle and flown carefree all the way to airplane mode
Merged several significant portions of Arducopter and Arduplane software on APM 2.5 hardware
- Heading strategies for quad and plane merged with unique tiltrotor control
- Seamless blend of servo actuated aerodynamic surfaces, and 2 brushless motors to achieve stable flight at any speed and intermediate thrust angle
Tiltrotor 1 Prototype Stats:
- All-up Gross Weight = 2.4 KG
- Motors= 2x G15 810kv with 14 inch CF props / single 3300 mah battery
- OGE Hover Power Required - 40 amps
- Conversion Power Required – Thrust vector at 30 degrees from vertical 10 m/s = 20 amps
- Airplane Power Required - 23 m/s = 30 amps
We have lots left to do, but would love to get some feedback to help guide us.
Here is what we have planned next:
Autonomous Flight
- Merge Copter and Plane navigation strategies to suit a tiltrotor.
Pixhawk
- We’d love to incorporate the new capabilities of EKF, spline waypoints, terrain following ect someday. The APM 2.5 has not limited our development at all, and is still our bread and butter.
Tiltrotor 2?
- We learned A LOT in a year. There are numerous things we can make better on this prototype, or improve upon with the “next generation” model. We’d like to build a bigger, better, more efficient tiltrotor with all the lessons learned. This is where we need some feedback from the community. Please read the detailed design summary (attached).
Of course we are not going to brag about designing a tiltrotor and NOT post a video.
Tiltrotor_1_Design_Summary.pdf
This barley summarizes a year of work in 10 minutes.
Comments
@Lazy- If you want to know more about the technical details than the attached PDF described, please ask away.
@Jake- Thanks for the sound advise. There is no doubt we would not be here without this communities hard work. Thanks for pointing us at these ESC's.
Forgot to mention... look at ESC32 as a project for better ESCs. You'll need to get up to speed on STM32s anyways, might be a good place to start.
Business aspects always create lots of dilemmas.
I work on an open-source project that might be commercialized at some point, so I know the level of labor involved in coding and electronics design.
Your options are really limited by the license of the code base you started with. Of course, you wouldn't be where you are today without it. If I were in your shoes I'd consider two courses.
Position yourself to market a VTOL before you release the code. That way you'll have the first mover advantage and an economy of scale. I'm guessing you're probably not in a great position to do this unless you want to seek a lot of venture capital, a task that will be difficult with the licensing issues.
What I'd really suggest is negotiating agreements with the existing big players. Strike a deal where you get a royalty on any VTOL aircraft they produce. If you can get several of the big players that should be pretty lucrative. A VTOL is useless without code to run it, so that seems like a fair deal to me. Your code enables their products and they are the ones that will profit from it. Once the code is out there will no doubt be small players that try to get in on the action, but their share will be small due to their market position and the lead time that you will have given the big dogs.
Everyone wins in that scenario. The big dogs sell lots of VTOLs they otherwise couldn't, the small guys get a small leg up in the market by not having the overhead of a small royalty to worry about (offset by their increased small volume costs), and the open source community gets cool new code to work with and experiment on. You'd essentially be leveling the playing field amongst aircraft manufacturers, make money, and also return a favor to the devs that helped make your work possible.
Interesting...Did you show more technical details?
Very good project and pro development!
It is sort of outside the scope of this blog post to discuss pay for coding, but it is definitely possible.
Thanks Jiro- We were unaware of this link. That is an awesome looking RC tiltrotor.
Great video!
Are you looking into this thread ?
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/drones-discuss/HC0b1L5MIuE
@Giovanni- Thanks! It was certainly not easy.
@Doug- We'd really love to have RPM feedback. We did do some research into it, but eventually we overcame some of the thrust problems with better flight control software.
@Tridge- Thanks! We'd sure love to see VTOL in the software menu someday!
@ Rob- Hover pitch certainly is the weakest link in our design. We have some ideas we'd like to incorporate in our design to improve things. The nature of our testing did require pretty low winds in general so we did not push hover pitch very hard, but by operating smartly, taking off into the winds and landing into the winds without gross maneuvering we felt pretty comfortable. Neither one of us has any RC heli experience, and the swashplate was quite intimidating both mechanically and with the number of channels on APM 2.5. I'm sure swashplate on each rotor would make this a truly awesome flying machine, so we will not give up on the idea! We don't have any plans or desires to manufacture and sell tiltrotors to people. We (kind of) understand the code rules about releasing branches of the code.
Is it generally the case that the developers here do not get or expect anything in return for their countless hours and personal financial expenses? It is very admirable if that is true. I really wish / hope the people that gave us the power to create our own tiltrotor were compensated for it in some way! You guys have opened many doors for others to be successful. Such a interesting new way to invent.
@R.D. Ill take a look at the scale Osprey. If you could post a link that would be awesome.
Great Work.
Keep it up guys
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