Flexible Quadcopter Is Nearly Indestructible

We’ve all crashed quadcopters. It’s almost inevitable. Everything is going along fine and dandy ’till mother nature opens her big mouth a blows a nasty gust of wind right at you, pushing your quad into the side of a wall. A wall that happens to be composed of a material that is quite a bit harder than your quadcopter. “What if…” you ask yourself while picking up the pieces of you shiny new quad off the ground… “they made these things out of flexible material?”

Well, it would appear someone has done just that. The crash resistant quadcopter is composed of a flexible frame (obviously) which is held rigid with magnets. So the frame works just like the frame of your average quad. Until you crash it, of course. Then it becomes flexible.

The idea came from the wing of a wasp, which you can apparently crumple without damaging it. Be sure to check out the video below of the drone showing off its flexible frame, and let us know if you’ve seen any other types of flexible frame drones in the wild.

Thanks to [JDHE] for the tip!

20 thoughts on “Flexible Quadcopter Is Nearly Indestructible

      1. The possible reason behind the error is actually very interesting, your left had can react faster that your right so when your brain’s language centre outputs UA the sequence can get executed by your fingers as AU.

  1. I wonder how well that idea will scale up to a multirotor with brushless motors.

    A battery failure a few days ago caused my biggest crash so far in over a year of flying these things:
    http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/CX-20_Crashedt.jpg
    Low voltage alarm triggered 100 meters up, then when bringing it down the battery gave up about 20 meters from the ground.

    Not the end of the world as I have two more of those quads plus a spare shell. Thankfully all the electronics still work but the trickiest part will be fixing the gimbal, the magnet for position sensing on the yaw motor came loose so I have to re-align it, which means a laborious trial trial and error loop consisting of: taking it apart, rotating the magnet a little, putting it back together, powering it up and seeing if it points in the right direction, if not start over.

  2. Sometimes it itches that HAD assumes their readers are all well positioned enough to play with electronic toys. Living in a Eastern European country where the minimum wage is around 356 USD it took years before I’ve seen a drone/copter in real after HAD published articles about them.

    The quad-copter in question was University owned…. Never seen anyone play with one in the fields. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t any but not as widespread as for example W-Europe.

    My guess is that a lot of readers come here to dream about possibilities and marvel the Western consumption society where people have time and money enough to create things with little purpose.
    To then write articles that sort of makes them feel out of the loop could sting a little.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.