Your Quadcopter Has Three Propellers Too Many

While studying failure modes for quadcopters, and how to get them safely to the ground with less than a full quad of propellers, a group of researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich came up with a great idea: a mode of flight that’s like the controlled spinning descent of a maple seed.

The Monospinner runs on the absolute minimum number of moving parts. Namely, one. Even a normal helicopter has a swash plate for adjustable blade pitch, and a tail rotor to keep it from spinning. Give up the idea that you want to keep it from spinning, and you can achieve controlled flight with a lot less. Well, one motor and a whole lot of math and simulation.

The Monospinner is carefully weighted so that it’s as stable as possible while spinning, but so far it’s unable to spin itself up from a standstill. In initial tests, they attached it to a pivot to help. The best part of the video (below) is when the researcher throws it, spinning, into the air and it eventually stabilizes. Very cool.

There’s an academic paper on the general idea, so you can get started with the number crunching. Our guess is that getting this thing to fly is non-trivial in the extreme. So kudos to the ETH folks for getting it (to stay) off the ground.

Thanks [lluki] for the tip!

Filed under: drone hacks

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