+1 Boring Company
Let’s use a precedent set long ago.
The SR-71 was ALWAYS flown on autopilot when it was at Mach3. It was never considered a drone.
The D-21, initially slated to be launched from the SR-71, was considered a drone and although all of its critical maneuvering was programmed just like the SR-71, it was unmanned. Whether it is manned or unmanned, to me, makes the distinction.
Now, Could a drone ship carry a group of people in a cargo bay? Yes. I think it could. But if there’s a pilot who’s job is simply to take the stick if things go wrong, the drone distinction is lost.
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In some literature I saw from the company, the inclusion of any sort of onboard manual controls at all is an OPTION, and didn’t even exist in their earlier versions. The thing is clearly designed to operate without a human pilot onboard. But if it still doesn’t meet your personal definition of “drone” that’s fine with me. Not worth arguing about.
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I had about 90 minutes dual in a helicopter, at that time I had logged about 150 hours fixed wing time.
And my hat’s off to any copter pilot. I could tell that I was not going to get the hang of it long before the 90 minutes were up.
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I have questions about this push-of-a-button “flight path” autonomy:
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Does it take into account other drones?
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Does it adjust for unexpected obstacles?
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Can it be hacked so the 1% fly into the sun or at least very deep water, possibly shark-infested?
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Ever seen a quadcopter fall out of the sky? When it’s just a cam, radio and the drone itself onboard, smacking into the ground is one thing. Even surrounding the passengers with Kevlar airbags, when those rotors shrapnel off it’s going to be another story.
These types of blades aren’t designed for autorotation which is what helps a traditional gyrocoptor attempt an unpowered “controlled” landing:
“That drone has fixed-pitch rotors, and that pitch is optimized for thrust, not for autorotation. In the absence of power, those rotors won’t autorotate. They will stop rotating ‘in the right way’ and then start windmilling in the opposite sense. That windmilling will cause drag and some deceleration of the fall, but not of the same magnitude as an autorotation, that is a different condition.”
Good further read: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/37360/can-a-passenger-drone-perform-auto-rotation
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Just to be a little pedantic, controlling the output of four motors directly, to control an aircraft would be impossible for most human pilots. Multirotor craft work because the control loop is abstracted in software. Similarly, we could probably do the same thing for helicopters, and make their operation equally easy.
I think the only reason you don’t see this in hobby helicopters, is those pilots are on average more conservative about changes to their copters. I think gyro’s where around for quite a while before ditching the flybar became the norm.
Personally, I love quads, but if I where to put myself, or anything I cared about in a toy like this, I’d prefer traditional collective pitch helicopter. At least then, in the event of a failure, there’s a chance we could autogyro the ground. A motor failure in a multirotor usually means a full stop to the motor, and that just sucks.
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thank FSM.
Unlike a helicopters blades where they have a swashplate controlling pitch, or a turbine stage running at far higher RPM, these are simple blades which can be very robust (assuming appropriate design and manufacture). A simple shroud for safety would probably be aerodynamically prohibitive, eating up efficiency and/or stability, not to mention a huge amount of dead weight.
A ducted fan idea would really only make sense if it rotated towards the direction of travel, like a V-22 Osprey or something. That is a huge increase in complication in the craft
Oh come on, this is the internet.
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Seriously! This is probably the one advantage to chosing a multi-rotor design. It makes operating the craft safer for everyone.
everyone is picking out problems but this is 1st gen
but imagine the 3rd or 4th generation of these, how much more quiet, efficient and stable they will be, how crashproof the cockpit, how only 4 fans with redundancy and a parachute on the cockpit for total failure
what I really like in that video is the little drone you can see in front of it for a moment - imagine flying around and having a bunch of slave mini-drones circling
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Drones controlled by people, who are inside the drone, aren’t drones. They are called “helicopters.”
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0:55…uh, thanks for the demo dude but I think everyone pretty much figures that out on their own right?
Silencing aircraft, particularly helicopters, is a problem that has been worked on for quite some time with little headway. The helicopters that were used to raid Bin Laden had some silencing capabilities, but they (helicopters in general) have very long blades that can provide a great amount of lift presuming they are rotating slower.
The compact size required by a quad/octo rotor design we see here requires very fast rotors - even with the consideration that they’re doubling them up, the blades are short. In order to get adequate lift, theyre going to spin very fast.
Your options:
More rotors → more weight & lots of mechanical complication if you want the blades to operate independently for safety.
More blades per rotor → more likely to get blade slap which is the opposite of what you want.
Longer blades → longer beams, more torque required → heavier hardware… probably going to wanna put the blades above the passenger compartment similar to the 1923 de Bothezat design
Modifying the airfoil profile: this ground has heavily trampled. you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.
edit: my guess would be the aforementioned Volocopter is probably the best one will get in terms of noise. And just look at that thing.
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Once again, these aircraft are designed to operate without being controlled by the person inside. You can’t strap a Labrador Retriever inside a helicopter and expect it to safely arrive at its destination all by itself.
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Was wondering about the safety aspects of this vs. a helicopter. A helicopter does not fall out of the sky if the engine fails. What happens to this thing if one of the six motors fails? If one of the twelve blades breaks what happens? Can it hover down safely? Obviously if the main power source fails (the battery pack blows a fuse or the engine fails) this thing simply drops out of the sky, unlike a conventional helicopter.
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If it’s anything like my drones, it’ll end up in a tree.
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I swear the first half of this video is using music from Skyrim.
a system of self driving road cars is just not going to happen on a large scale, but if these things can drive themselves, I am all in favor of fleets of them being used to bring people on short hops to mass transit depots - as long as we don’t fly them ourselves and they don’t crash too often.
Flying Cars!!! Wheeeeeeeee.
It will in the end, and a lot sooner than most planes would!
Crowded urban environments with many scattered high rises are going to have seriously tricky wind currents and odd updrafts/downdrafts.
I seem to recall the wind effects around the Twin Towers were quite impressive.
I’d be curious (from a very safe distance) as to how they will handle microbursts at low altitude.
Or seriously territorial hawks as I know a number of cities with significant hawk populations now as, apparently, pigeons is good eatin’.
