A few months ago, I posted some video and pictures of a tilt-rotor quadcopter called iQuad. Since then, I've been working on building a new version of iQuad which is lighter, has a cleaner design, and adds FPV. The new iQuad weighs 1600 grams w/o batteries (down from 2260) thanks to a carbon fiber body and custom-built rotation mechanism and landing legs. My goal for this version is to achieve faster forward flight and eventually add 3D-printed wings to get airplane-like flight characteristics.
The previous iQuad used unmodified arducopter firmware, with the tilt servos being directly controlled by one of the channels on my radio, which limited the tilt angle at which the APM was still able to produce stable flight. For this version, I am going to control the tilt servos directly from the APM, for which I'll need to write some custom firmware. (any help would be appreciated as I am new to arducopter development)
Here are some more photos:
Comments
I'm starting out as a quad as well for testing purposes but scaling up to ducted counter-rotating props for the final version. I guess you worked the math and figured out that an X8 is necessary to really haul a good payload... When you start getting heavy, you gotta get the higher airspeed to maintain level flight which forces you into steep prop pitches. That ends up cutting down on the thrust you need for vertical takeoff so the extra set of props comes in handy.
This is what I've been working for the last 9 months. It's a VTOL / Tilt-Rotor. The frame can also fly stand alone as well. Right now it's configured as a quad, but I'm going to add 4 more motors to make it an X8 VTOL. This way it can lift/carry a decent payload.
In 'airplane' mode it flies for about 40 minutes on 8000ma 4S.
Hey Rob, Ilya... Joining the conversation a little late here but I'm working on exactly the concept this thread left off on. I've got an X-configured asymetric-winged airframe that's about 80% complete... so it's really time to buckle down on coding for this thing. I know Ilya has modified the Arducopter software for his project but I would think attitude control for this multicopter-plane would be similar to controlling two tandem flying wings with independent servo control for each elevon. If you synced the servos, you should be able to coordinate your roll and pitch as though it were only one flying wing (assuming you pitch the wings correctly).
... You guys have any thoughts on the advantages of modifying arduplane over arducopter? Anyone thought about doing the reverse? Build a tilt rotor biplane, tell the four servos to align vertical for takeoff, then roll those babies forward until you exceed your stall speed?
Comments?
What you see there is ONLY using APM 2.5. The only reason I mention the KK Board is because of OpenAero2-VTOL. I'm using a FrySky Taranis, and connecting to the APM via SBus/CPPM using a convert. That gives me all 16 channels from the X8R Receiver. I'm doing all mixing on the receiver. The flight you're seeing is an early test flight. It's much more stable now.
It's really the functionality of OpenAero2-VTOL that I'm looking for so I'm trying to use both. What I was really wondering is if it could be set up with APM as 'master' and KK Board as slave. I'm going to just try it to see how it works.
Bill be careful, aren't you using a "bad" word there? APM Only on this discussion group. You are going to take the "other" board code and convert it to APM ?
In the mean time for a pof concept you can use both, and have one start at certain prameters and turn off such as ground speed indicator...
Your concern with the "rotors tilt forward" the control for roll and yaw start to swap maybe similar to a problem during the early testing of the Osprey V-22 project. This could be Vortex Ring State. See Wikipedia Vortex Ring State.
Quick update... after three days of test flights, I was finally able to get stable forward flight. On my last day of flying, I actually hit a top speed of 53.3 miles per hour (based on GPS logs) while flying FPV (with a 40 degree rotor tilt)!!! I'll post videos and some details of what I learned over the last couple of days.
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