Andreas’ Personal Flying Suit (“Monocopter”) Project
technologie-entwicklung.de
technologie-entwicklung.de
Is anyone building a quadricopter that'll hold one person and fit in a 2 car garage? I bet a lot of those would sell.
I haven't seen any examples larger than models though, do they not scale trivially?
> the only real danger would be people doing stupid things with them on purpose
Not even close. The quadricopter design is very non-robust in the presence of a failed engine. That alone is probably a show-stopper for ever having one of these as a passenger vehicle.
They do make wicked cool spy drones though.
Also, is there a reason these couldn't auto-gyro? The mechanics of how that works has always been a bit fuzzy for me.
Auto-gyroing would require pitch control of the blades. The toy quadcopters control by differential thrust and torque. For attitude, they control the thrust of the different motors to get a vectored thrust effect. For orientation, the pairs of motors are spinning in opposite directions, so if you spin a pair faster and a pair slower, the torque imbalance between the CW and CCW spinning motors will spin the quadrotor body.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrotor
Autorotation in a helicopter is done by setting the blade pitch negative so that the rotor is driven by the air wooshing up through the rotor. When you are close to the ground, you pull collective, trading the energy stored in the spinning of the rotor blades for vertical thrust to slow your descent. If you do it right, you land gently with a much slower rotor speed. If you do it wrong, you fall the last five feet. :-O
(Auto-gyro works like a helicopter auto-rotation. I suspect auto-gyros typically don't have as much blade pitch control as a helicopter. As I understand it, it is much safer to land an auto-gyro with forward velocity and a roll-out rather than vertically like a helicopter.)
Twin engine airplanes have this problem too but it's much less severe. Adverse roll is a second-order effect in an airplane, it's a first-order effect in a quad. An airplane has the tail tending to stabilize it. Despite all that, losing an engine on takeoff in a twin engine aircraft is often catastrophic. In a quad, I'd wager good money (though not my entire life savings) that it's unrecoverable. But if you're going to put human passengers in it you have to plan for that because it will happen sooner or later.
The gas generator that runs the big fan is probably ventilated well enough not to burn the pilot.