The PowerEgg unfolds to reveal a fully-functional quadcopter (Credit: PowerVision)
From Gizmag
By: DAVID SZONDY FEBRUARY 12, 2016
Conventional drones are often billed as portable, though they're also often a collection of rods, rotors, and other bits and pieces that are perfect for catching on things and getting tangled. To make taking drones into the backcountry a bit less onerous, Beijing-based Powervision Robot has taken the gubbins of a quadcopter and built them into a giant PowerEgg that folds up into one smooth package shaped like a cackleberry for transport.
The product of 18 months of development, the PowerEgg is PowerVision's first mainstream commercial drone and draws on technology developed for the company's industrial drones. According to the developers, the egg design is not only to allow the quadcopter to act as its own carrying case, but also for compactness and stability.
When switched off, the PowerEgg folds up into a smooth ovoid shell, but when ready for flight the sides split and unfold into landing gear and arms for the folding rotors. Meanwhile, the bottom of the egg opens to reveal a 360-degree panoramic 4K HD camera on a three-axis gimbal. According to PowerVision, the rotors are larger than usual for comparable drones, which required a degree of re-engineering.
Full article and video here
Comments
That looks cool, but it is just rendering. I wonder where is the camera.
@Gary
Heehee. I removed my 'marketing' since it wasn't my original material, but I hope it made somebody smile.
via GIPHY
.
That's funny, we've been working on the same thing. Although we do not have such fancy renderings ;)
Give away is the tolerances of the arms and legs; every engineer would love to get stuff to fit this tight in the real world.
How do you change the battery?
I like it, the design is really cool and offer even better "rugged" performance than the Sprite (from ascentaero), with the blades and the landing legs concealed inside.
The blades of course folds and unfolds manually.
Now they just have to show us the real thing, not just the renderings...
Someone is going to end up with "egg on their face".. literally.
The problem is the embarssing "sitting on the egg" calibration...
At least until they show how the blades actually unfold themselves as in the video, i'm calling BS
is there a video of it actually flying?
@Thomas Stone, thwse were my thoughts on the marketing
Should, whilst out butterfly collecting I see a volcano erupting in the distance I might also send one off to look. If I were flying my balloon however I would be looking land and runaway from the aforementioned volcano. Nice mowed field to the right of that dam, but looking at the smoke its calm (not for long)
http://www.suasnews.com/2016/02/41842/ Amazing how things are magically discovered and posted all over the web after we break the releases ;-)
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next