Vehicles that change their shape and form to adapt to their operating environment have long captured the imagination of tech enthusiasts, and building one remains a perennial project dream for many makers. Now, [Michael Rechtin] has made the dream a bit more accessible with a 3D printed quadcopter that seamlessly transforms into a tracked ground vehicle.
The design tackles a critical engineering challenge: most multi-mode vehicles struggle with the vastly different rotational speeds required for flying and driving. [Michael]’s solution involves using printed prop guards as wheels, paired with lightweight tracks. An extra pair of low-speed brushless motors are mounted between each wheel pair, driving the system via sprockets that engage directly with the same teeth that drive the tracks.
The transition magic happens through a four-bar linkage mounted in a parallelogram configuration, with a linear actuator serving as the bottom bar. To change from flying to driving configuration the linear actuator retracts, rotating the wheels/prop guards to a vertical position. A servo then rotates the top bar, lifting the body off the ground. While this approach adds some weight — an inevitable compromise in multi-purpose machines — it makes for a practical solution.
Powering this transformer is a Teensy 4.0 flight controller running dRehmFlight, a hackable flight stabilization package we’ve seen successfully adapted for everything from VTOLs to actively stabilized hydrofoils.
Pretty sure that’s a “nope” right there. From the picture alone one can see that the wheels have a track of gear teeth in the middle of the outer side(?) and sprockets with much larger spacing on both outer sides (the rims?).
The drive motor engages with the gear-track and the tracks engage with the sprockets.
Clearly visible in the video @6:30
Interesting concept but from skimming the video this looks very heavy. The four (or eight) big bearings for the wheels alone…
Did you stop watching the video at your specified time because the weight problem was addressed in the video and it was resolved by creating plastic bearings (more or less) over the probably more reliable metal ones. The center sprocket to engage the wheel movement isn’t novel either, there are several toys out there that use similar techniques to reduce part counts. If you really want to see some crazy ideas on cheaping down products to achieve similar movements then start disassembling children’s toys and be amazed how they do so much with so little. Can we celebrate this guy just made the next toy that can be worked on a little more to potentially light up some kid’s birthday or Christmas? Hell, might even inspire another Osprey contract with equally disregard to safety.
nope. I continued skimming it after I send off my comment and didn’t see any reason to reply with an update because the point still stands IMO.
Won’t watch it again but it was reduced from 3,5kg to 2,9kg with rebuilding almost everything and replacing the bearings, wasn’t it?
That’s ~17% less. Quite a bit but ~3kg is still very heavy isn’t it?
Still – Interesting design.
Lol, gotta respect sticking to your guns.
If you separated the track rotation to continue in flight mode you could take advantage of the gyroscopic effect increasing stability and maybe gaining control of the craft better but at the expense of power requirements.
Neat, I wonder if this could be adapted to a Mars rover? Bigger wheels/rotors of course.
Probably no, and not worth it. The atmosphere on Mars is extremely thin, so it was a very hard thing to fly with Ingenuity, so any extra weight have to be worth it. If you can fly, and there is no trees, better use that and invest the weight in more useful kit than wheels and mechanicals for just that. Read the mechanical design here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
It won’t scale up.
To much weight not used for flying (track engines, tracks, wheels, actuators, various components used for transformation, etc).
Also in tracked configuration the propellers are very exposed and can break.
If you want something that can do both you’ll have to settle for something doing not very well ground and air transportation.
There is a reason we do not have newer VTOL planes, flying cars or flying tanks.
But I wish we had them.