I hope they never make an airplane out of this.

What about a helicopter? This looks like a nice UAV platform.

How is this any different/better than a helicopter?

@Bob

-Cost
-Size
-Part Count

It’s basically an unbalanced helicopter. Cameras might not make a good payload, but how about a thermal sensor? Or geiger counter?

A couple of questions:

Is it in some way more efficient or crash resistant than a helicopter?

Can the platform be stable enough to transport items that can’t or shouldn’t themselves be spun at the rate of rotation?

What was with the onboard vomit cam? A stable camera, I could see that. A spinning view showing only the fixed wing as it rotates too fast for anything else — not so good for anything but perhaps inducing epilepsy.

That’s an amazingly elegant design. Every movement of the craft, from altitude control to direction and speed of travel, is performed ENTIRELY by changing the angle of attack of a single wing with the correct timing.
No need to an antispun camera pod either, you could fit a linescan camera and use the high rotation rate to form an image.

The really great thing is, it should be easy and cheap to build your own. You only need one motor with a really course speed control, a single servo, some foam, and a microcontroller (cue ArduinoRAGE). Add an accelerometer and gyro module to measure spin rate and current craft angle, and the control system is a simple loop of code polled several times per rotation.

“You know… that joke got old after the first time you said it, and now it appears in every single article…. ”
Joke? The video is embedded after the page break, what’s supposed to be funny? It’s the standard way to refer to something in a main article linked from a summary.

Yeah there IS NO page break.

This is AWESOME.

anyone know the purpose of those bright orange/red lights that appear in some of the test footage?

are they markers for image processing?

There is a break if you are reading from the home page of hackaday.

Awesome craft. You could get around the camera with software, most likely a higher end camera and provide a panoramic view of where you are. I think being able to see all around you would be useful in a UAV.

Do people really not understand breaks in a news blog post?

I love this concept, I’ve stared off at hundreds of the little bastards(maple seeds) falling and wondered if something like this could be done.

I guess for them to get lateral movement, they must have some sense of direction when spinning around – the thing looks like it spins well fast enough that you could have the camera only grab images at a precise moment to give a stabilized image – FPS would be directly proportional to RPM of the craft. In theory it works, but I’m sure there’s issues with the exposure rate and such.

The page linked to in turn linked to http://www.x-naves.com and (correct me if I’m wrong) the side panel appears to indicate that the designers are willing to sell these things via special request by email. (Just let’n you know because I just know there is someone out there pining to buy this thing)

this could snap your head off quite easily :)

“How is this any different/better than a helicopter?”

Take this and a helicopter up to the same altitude, cut power. This device will auto-rotate and slow its descent automatically, the helicopter won’t.

Reminds me of what I did with ground flower fireworks when I was a teenager. I used a 3×5 card to make a wing on the side opposite the flame.

“Take this and a helicopter up to the same altitude, cut power. This device will auto-rotate and slow its descent automatically, the helicopter won’t.”
Uh, helicopters autorotate too, you know.

Cool as a concept. Seriously. But is it one of those “we built it because we could” things? What aviation problem does it solve or improve? Does it use less energy/fuel to stay aloft? Is it super silent or stealthy?

as it ascends it could make as 3d model of a room. perhaps useful for swat/military

MANHACKS!

@Buzzkill,

What problem does it solve? The one the customer paid for. Primarily it was built because DARPA is funding a nano-scale flight platform, for whatever reason.

Because it’s DARPA, we can make a guess or two. Maybe they want a small reconnaissance platform that has the same radar profile as a bird. Maybe they have to be light and small enough for a single recon soldier to carry several. Maybe they have to land uncontrolled, but quietly. Maybe they have to be silent at 50 meters or less.

Since DARPA is a research organization, maybe they didn’t have an exact original plan, but a few ideas of what a nano-scale flier would be capable of. And after they see what gets built, they adapt their plans to use its unique features.

After seeing this video, I’m guessing they’ll formulate a usage scenario specific to the device. I imagine something like this:
1. Fly them at a silent running altitude over a specific target (maybe 200 meters.)
2. Cut power and allow them to drop silently into an enemy camp.
3. Allow them to spin and photograph all the way down.
4. Establish the number and location of hostiles and civilians.
5. Send in the Predators or the Rangers or the Seals or the mortar shells.

hi Reminded me of this single wing UAV
http://veratech.aero/phantom.html

HAAAAACKS!

@EdZ – line scan camera

This my friend is a BRILLIANT idea! not only the picture is stable, but you get 360′ view for free.
I just looked how fast are those things and fastest scanners I could find do ~50 A4 pages per minute, thats 3508 pixels x50 /60 = 3000 scans per second = 40 pixels at 60rpm. That is too slow :(

Wonder what is the
-average speed of rotation
-minimal speed below which you crash (like stall in planes)

Where is the center of mass on those things? veratech.aero says:
>”Phantom’s single rotor blade has a center of
>rotation outside of the UAVs’ physical fuselage”

but on the video you can see that rotation is centered around wing mount point, same with Samara Micro-Air – it also centers around wing mount point, and the battery (or whatever that is) on the opposite side of the rotor is there only to balance the thing.

Beauty of this design is obvious and shown at the end of teh video – it crashes and even manages to damage attack edge of the wing, dude just flips it over and it flies again = ultra rugged design.

ok got the rotation speed from one of the TV News interviews with Samara Micro-Air guy, its 10 RPM. Now that is decent, easy to control and you can use normal camera modules ($5 Sony cameraphone modules do 120 fps at 1296H x 243V). That works out to 8 cycles per degree. ~3000 pixels panorama.

What got me all giggly was how he stated with pride “I applied for patents”. veratech.aero also has in bold letters how they hold several Patents .. on nature. Not to mention the insistence on “defense” aspects (read dropping bombs and killing people). Americans are funny (in a look at me Im retarded way).

BTW on Samara webpage: “Our company’s mission is to pioneer the Samara paradigm”. So not only did he sound retarded boasting “defense” aspects, he also writes retarded, does he have MBA or something?

Larz in this vid yes, but in the long run you will want a camera that can see the surroundings.

btw looks like Subscribe is broken, at least for me :( I stopped getting notifications and instead get weird “confirm that you really really want to subscribe”, but confirming doesnt work :(

If this thing is constantly in rotation, how does he manage to make it go left or right or forward or backward ?

@rasz
I was also struck with how awesome a linescan camera would be. Thanks for posting those camera specs.

Regarding patents, this is one of those rare ideas that I would say deserves one. It’s oversimplifying to say that he’s “patenting nature”; how many natural maple seeds have you seen that can be remotely piloted and take video? 3 years of work went into perfecting the details of this design; it would be a shame if some chump could just rip off that effort.

You cant patent a design (at least not in normal world, I bet USPTO doesnt care and just rubber stamps every garbage like they do with software patents), only implementation. There is nothing magical about implementing this thing in general. veratech.aero proves that having independent implementation (heh, they patented things like recovering angle of aircraft from the signal received by semi directional antenna instead of using gyro/compass, obvious stuff that should not get any patent on its own, but in US you just throw two things together and receive a patent).

yes, “unique aspects of implementation”. Too bad those aspects are obvious, but somehow putting two such “aspects” together grants you a patent in US.

Hope someone finds a peaceful use for this before the Army uses it.

I am wondering if you could implement this with a fixed wing pitch and just control height by adjusting power. That would reduce the number of moving parts and cost even further.

@rasz

Well, just the same construction as it is now, but without the servo controlling the wing pitch. So lateral control would work as it does now, but vertical control just by supplying more or less power. More power = up, less = down.

FYI:
Based on the same maple seed, Frank Lloyd Wright was inspired to design his ‘Samara House’, which I visited a few years ago. Worth a visit if you are in Lafayette, IN.
http://www.samara-house.org/

The camera exposure issue for a cheap camera at high shutter is easily fixed by adding aligned images together. Line scan or regular, create a 360 degree image, some clever software stabilization control and a orientation sensitive HMD and you’d have an awesome little spy device!

could also use a linear ccd extracted from a scanner- those are already fairly compact and with suitable software could generate a 360 degree image.

interestingly with the modern accelerometers and single axis chip gyros this could be scaled down to pager motor size, using an electrostatic actuator for pitch control.

@bothersaidpooh: The prototype demonstrated at 1:27 in the video uses a pager motor for thrust and + SMA for pitch. Of course SMA is a lot slower than the 10hz that would be needed for directonal pitch. I was planning on giving a voice coil a try if I ever build one.

Also, the line ccd in a scanner sounds like a worthwhile avenue to pursue. Pricewatch reports new scanners to be had for as little as $25.

umm…. nature created that design for seeds to fall down… not to hover upwards.. therfore i dont think this design would be better than a helicopter design, but could be usefull for other things..

@AllYouPeopleWonderingAboutTheVomitCam

Forgive me if this has already been suggested, ’cause I didn’t take the time to read every damn comment.

I’m guessing that it’s fed into the software for the autonomous flight demonstrations.

With the bright IR lights arranged at known places in the room, software could be written to extrapolate location and maintain altitude. Notice the green blobs traveling in parallel horizontal lines once it gets going, that’s an easy thing to monitor with some machine vision.