Blogs

Transverse Rotor UAV: Bell-Hiller CONCEPT

Posted by Jeff on February 7, 2010 at 11:30am



I have been moving forward with my project to build a transverse rotor UAV. Here is a quick overview of this Bell-Hiller concept. (Oh, btw this is only a quick sketch done in Google Sketchup, it isn't totally to scale nor have I drawn in the entire structure)


1) Single brushless motor will drive conter-rotating rotors
2) CCPM swash plate will provide additional level of control including roll-control w/o gyroscopic affects.
3) I am using a Bell-Hiller mixing instead of mounting rotors directly to motors (no swash or flybar) and using large servos to control pitch and roll. This will allow for added inherent stability, and I will be able to use much smaller servos

Next step is to verify this design with the community (you), decide how much I can buy off the shelf vs how much I need to build myself, and then start building and working on the electronics portion. As soon as I know how many servos/sensors I'll need, I'll choose a microcontroller and start that parallel project. Stay tuned, I've told too many people about this project to give up now... :-)


E-mail me when people leave their comments –
Follow

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • jaron February 8, 2010 at 12:31pm
    This is not exactly what you want but basically the same: Twinn Rexx
    Tech Model Products Twinn_Rexx Tandem Helicopter Page
  • Developer
    Mark Colwell February 8, 2010 at 8:13am
    With collective pitch helicopters, I found that smaller was twitchy, no hands-off hover, but with larger choppers the inertia helps to stabilize chopper allowing 5-10 second of hands free hovering. 500 plastic Clones are $68 Also micro choppers are harder to work on, more susceptible to crash damage.
  • Jeff February 8, 2010 at 7:02am
    the t rex 500 is nearly 35" in length. I'm shooting for 8". Am I going in the completely wrong direction, thinking that I can reap the benefits of inherent stability for such a small platform?
  • Developer
    Mark Colwell February 7, 2010 at 10:18pm
    Think about a T-rex 500 size platform, It would be more stable and easily carry your multiple cpus sensors and video, good parts are available etc..
  • Jeff February 7, 2010 at 9:50pm
    the body is 7" wide and so overall ~10in, however I'm still trying to further scale it down. I'm trying to get this to 8 x 8 x 2.5in total .

    I'm using flybars because I fear that as I shrink this platform, it will require very sensitive servos and high i/o bandwidth sensors to stay autonomously stable. I have a blade msr and I was thinking of maybe modifying a set of msr rotor heads to ccpm.

    Add a basic 3axis accelerometer under each prop, a digital compass and gyroscope for stabilization, and many long nights programming, and I think I can make this a rather stable sub micro VTOL. I'm not sure I want to rely on sensors for the whole route.

    thanks for the advice guys, I agree this is a major project! I hope to do it right the first time...so keep your comments coming I appreciate it. I'll be sure to share the progress I make.
  • Jack Crossfire February 7, 2010 at 3:42pm
    The T-Rex 450 rotor head is what most people use for this. It was under $200 last year & can be converted to flybarless. Since modern gyros are free, most people don't bother with bell hiller mixing anymore.
This reply was deleted.