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!
Obligatory “you spelled quadcopter wrong in the headline”, comment.
A before U, unless after Q, or in sounding like Fail, as in “QaudCopter”… thanks, fixed!
That is super clever.
Freaking brilliant.
Never had my quad’s body break on me, but I go through a ton of propellers. Those could do with some more forgiving materials.
If you get the right props, they are! Gemfan ABS props can be bent back and forth a few times before they give out.
maybe flexible rubber blades with a memory metal skeleton?
I would imagine that this frame would help absorb some of the forces which cause the prop breakage… it may not help every time, but I would think it is better than nothing.
Typo: title should be Quadcopter not Qaudcopter
Haha! That is a bad speeling eror.
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.
Actually I’m just really bad at spelling, and wholly dependent on spell check.
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.
ive busted landing gear assemblies more times than i can count
I like how the demonstration avoids showing you broken props at all cost
I believe hard rubber blades would work great
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.
Extremely pleased that my first ever tip submission was picked up!
unbreakable aircraft?
Challenge accepted!
Launchpad McQuack is my spirit animal! :)
Interesting concept, will be interesting to see how this scales up to larger craft. Would be great for beginners.