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tintor

How will this new tech affect the current drone war between Russia and Ukraine?

Smaller, cheaper, more numerous offensive drones?

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This tech is more than a decade old, originally from UPenn AFAIK[0].

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=aEPf0QHVuMM

I strongly doubt adding a ton of extra weight in aerodynamic surfaces, and drag, and complex mechanical parts, to avoid a few motors/servos is worth it in that context.

Every gram of weight you remove is another gram of explosive you can add. Also consider the difference in supply lines for aerodynamic surfaces and mechanic parts and motors and servos. If you have four hundred servos, you can make one hundred quadcopters, or four hundred of these things. If you only have one hundred control boards powerful enough to control the single motor design though, you can still only make one hundred. (Tho the quadcopter can lift 4x the weight)

What's interesting is that the Ukrainians are building drones near their front lines because if they build them too far away and ship them in, the game has evolved and those drones are already yesterday's news.

A fixed wing drone only needs one motor, the control is easier, and the physics are more favorable for carrying high ordnance. I'm skeptical that this is going to change much.

It's cool in that it can hover and do quadcopter type flight with only a single motor, and it's that second part that is interesting, because a fixed wing can also do a prop hang, but it can't do quadrotor-like flight from there.

It's usefulness is likely to be in other areas -- mainly applications where that flight mode is important.

A fixed wing drone needs at least one extra motor for the control surfaces. More likely two or three.

This design still requires an additional servo for rotor actuation, so the minimum number of actuators is the same as for a fixed wing (roll and yaw are coupled, so the bare minimum is a single rudder servo).

No, the rotors are tilted by timing the acceleration from the single motor - there's no servo in the design in the video.

My bad. I skimmed the early part of the video with the sound down on the train this morning and thought I saw a servo in there. That's clever, but it doesn't really change much. There's not really any advantage in terms of payload or performance over existing designs.

Larger fixed wing drone could deliver many smaller quadcopters that don't have the long range.

> the Ukrainians are building drones near their front lines

Both sides 3d print parts near front lines. Just to be clear.

Especially when it comes to drops.

It won't. This is not going to work with a payload and the degree of control is too low. It's a very cool POC though.

maybe new breakthroughs for the darpa project. kamikazes drones do not need so advanced prop tbh it is against the idea of being cheap.

This type of rotors are not highly resistant to winds. That's why drones don't look like this already.

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