Full disclosure: I was one of the judges. Too many great entries -- it was hard to pick a winner. From Popular Science:
Zelator, by Alexey Medvedev of Omsk, Russia, which won first place in the Airbus Main Prize.
The contest, which got underway this spring, ultimately netted 425 submissions.
The drones had a length list of requirements, including a weight below 55 pounds, the ability to take off and land vertically, and a pusher propeller.
There were nine winning designs (three places in each of three categories), and in total they were awarded over $100,000.
The Zelator entry can be viewed here. It features a sleek cargo compartment, a powerful engine for forward thrust in flight, and four smaller rotors to provide vertical lift.
The SkyPac drone designed by Finn Yonkers of North Kingstown, Rhode Island won the cargo category. SkyPac features a versatile tubular body that can fit many different loads for many missions, as designed, including dropping life preservers for sea rescue. Finally, Frédéric Le Sciellour of Pont De L’Arn, France won the community category with his slick Thunderbird design, a very horizontal craft with a hidden storage compartment in the main body.
Comments
+1 John
Unless you make a paper airplane from the documentation itself, none of them have flown, or will fly from documentation alone. :-p
I think some credit should be given, especially to current and prior devs, that they do in fact know what they are talking about. (If not why were some employed by 3DR?) Plus, biasing an argument with a loaded statement by coloring the AIrbus as "idiots", or otherwise everyone else here as such, should be retracted IMHO.
There is no clear statement of intent from Airbus that outlines their goals for the UAV competition, bar idea and IP harvesting, and dipping their toe into a potentially ludicrous market, at little or know cost, by their marketing group.
Even the best engineers in the world are just people...and everyone makes mistakes. :-i
How about even a rudimentary power requirement calculation? The battery on the winning entry, just based on visual scale, doesn't appear to be even close to that required. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
One commenter on the Zelator entry pointed out the thrust calculations are completely out to lunch.
@Chris, respectfully no documentation is not going to fix the structural wing problem, impossible placement with regard to cg and under dimensioned VTOL motors and propellers for the weight class etc.
@Chris - before I shot my mouth off before, I looked up what the deliverables were :)
(found here: https://cocreate.localmotors.com/localmotors/airbus-cargo-drone-cha...)
Perhaps I wasn't privvy to further requirements but nowhere in here did I see an analysis breakdown of the sort I would require of my students when I was teaching aircraft design courses. Deliverables copied below.
That being said, in a tie for primary complaint on my part would be the over-constraint of the design space.
Furthermore, from the T's and C's of the competition (a dry read...):
The selection will be based especially on the following criteria:
● Ease of maintenance
● Safety
● Ease of handling
● Novelty/Innovation
And no mention of design performance or feasibility!
Here are the requirements I found online:
The following deliverables can be done as 2D or 3D drawings or models, but all entries must include the following boards:
Brief design description
Included on top of submission page
Requirements
General inspiration for design
Explanation of design details
Landing gear
“Waterproofness”
Modularity/Ship-ability
Ease of handling
Weight
Fail Safe components to prevent catastrophic failure
Safety provisions: Limit time on ground with rotors spinning
3-view drawings (top, side, front) with major dimensions
Show structural concept (spars, carbon rods, etc)
Show main structural components (wings, fuselage, inner structure)
Show equipment location (batteries, motors, actuators etc.)
Show location of supplied space reservations from the ignition kit
Show landing gear concept
Payload and Cargo concept (to be included as sketch and short design description)
Interior dimensions along with provisions for securing cargo
Configurability concept to change from cargo to sensor payload
Optional Deliverables
Isometric view
@ Chris Anderson: without a hint I would guess the answer is 2) is more likely, meaning that the end result is a well documented 3D rendering ( I doubt that there is any working prototype of the winners)
There are two possibilities: either 1) you guys are right and all the Airbus team are idiots, or 2) there was a lot more documentation for each project that is not available to public yet.
As a judge who has seen all that additional documentation, I can give you a hint as to which of these is more likely.
Yep, so as I suspected, the whole thing was just some weird joke.
I really don't know what the point was. Was it just a PR campaign for Airbus? If so, to what end? That's a lot of money to spend to end up with a rendering that doesn't have much use other than the cover of a science fiction novel.
I wonder how long before the Zelator-28 is offered on Kickstarter?
Without putting actual analysis up alongside pretty pictures, I wonder what the point of all of this was? This really just feels like a large brainstorming session for configurations that might be amenable to further investigation and a chance to show off some CAD chops.
I've seen this happen time and time again where the overly-defined constraints of the problem lead to a bunch of conventional designs (nothing particularly novel about the winner here...) instead of really allowing off-the-wall ideas. That, combined with a lack of first order approximations of performance (constraint diagram? weight fraction analysis? mission profile?) makes this seem like a good way to attract positive attention but overall... this isn't a way to design aircraft. The mission is what matters, so mandating that something have a minimum of 4 motors seems like a silly requirement to start out with.
Obviously I have complaints about this sort of thing, so the solution for me was to just not participate and I wouldn't dream of suggesting that others change their behavior based on my prejudices, I'd just like to hope that the next iteration of something like this could be a bit more rigorous when it comes to the actual contest setup, requirements, and metrics for judging.
Sure when in need of complexity, add trust vectoring. :)
And if we are going to nitpick, there is no need for the ruder when you already have a v-tail (provided it has control surfaces).
Why do it the easy way with elevators? Why not articulate the fuselage behind the wing?
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