Collaborate Disseminate
Picking propeller size for any aircraft, but especially VTOLs, it’s a tradeoff between size and RPM. You can either move a large volume of air slowly or a small volume …read more Continue reading Large Tip Driven Copter Turns Very Slowly
“Just add solar panels to the wings” is a popular suggestion for improving the flight times of fixed-wing drones. However, the reality is not so simple, and it’s easy to …read more Continue reading Solar Plane Might Be Able To Last Through The Night
With high-altitude ballooning, you are at the mercy of the winds, which can move your payload hundreds of kilometers and deposit it in some inaccessible spot. To solve this [Yohan …read more Continue reading R2Home Is Ready To Bring Back Your High Altitude Payload
Multirotor drones are significantly more popular than conventional helicopter designs for many reasons, which do not include efficiency. Making use of the aerodynamic effects behind this, [Nicholas Rehm] was able …read more Continue reading Turn Drone Into A Large Propeller To Increase Hover Efficiency
The differences between a drone and an underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV) aren’t actually that large. Both have powerful motors that move large volumes of fluid (yes, air is a fluid), …read more Continue reading It Turns Out You Can’t Just Fly A Drone Under Water
One staple of science fiction is the ornithopter, which is a plane with moving wings. While these haven’t proved very practical in the general sense, a recent paper talks about …read more Continue reading Up in the Sky… It’s a Bird… It’s a Drone… Oh Yeah, It’s a Drone
It sounds like a rhetorical question that a Midwestern engineer might ask, something on the order of ‘can you fix this bad PCB spin?’ [Tom Stanton] sets out to answer …read more Continue reading Can A Drone Push A Bike?
When it comes to hobby rotorcraft, it almost seems like the more rotors, the better. Quadcopters, hexacopters, and octocopters we’ve seen, and there’s probably a dodecacopter buzzing around out there …read more Continue reading When Sticks Fly
What is it that’s not quite either a plane or a boat, but has characteristics of both? There are probably a lot of things that fit that description, but the …read more Continue reading This Machine-Vision Ekranoplan Might Just Follow You Home
Drones have revolutionized the world of videography in perhaps the biggest way since the advent of digital hardware. They’re used to get shots that are impractical or entirely impossible to …read more Continue reading Drone Filming Chile’s Urban Bike Race Takes Some Fancy Radio Gear