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Comment by senkora | Hacker News Reader

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senkora·

Video of that model of drone: https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/13juxdi/pt...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA1ENhxLqTo

I really like that it switches off the outer pair of propellers in level flight, that's a nice feature.

Changing the vertical alignment of the wings to horizontal after takeoff is also really cool, an interesting alternative to 4 vertical propellers with a separate pair of wings. It seems to eliminate the extra moving parts to control those vertical propellers.

The linkage system is pretty cool I will say that.

Something actually patent-worthy.

How? it's just a UAV, quad version of a V-22 Osprey. Maybe I'm missing something peculiar about it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Boeing_V-22_Osprey

The hinge mechanism and the control dynamics.

Osprey has a common power shaft between the engines for fault tolerance, constraining the structure's design, such as the lack of dihedral. This has a different set of design constraints and a different solution to propulsion failure.

"just" is doing a lot of work there. Everything is "just" an evolution of something else. Doesn't mean it's not novel or clever.

The wing folding mechanism is pretty novel as far as I'm aware. The idea of quad hover to forward flight isn't new or unique but the specific configuration is something I haven't seen before. NASA was working on some that tilted the whole wing not this folding design which uses fewer motors compare to the old NASA Greased Lightning test article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXql26sF5uc

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