For many reasons, Singapore is the perfect place for robot taxies, and likely will be one of the first places to have public air taxi service. A compact, thoroughly wired urban area, with a tech savvy population and friendly government.
Not coincidently, then, Singaporean researchers are definitely pushing forward on UAV technologies. I look to Singapore to see where UAVs are going to be.
There are a lot of ways to build robot helicopters. Quadcopters are the overwhelming favorite on the market today, but there are a lot of ways copters can work.
We’ve seen designs with one rotor (!) up to 18 rotors (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) : – )
This summer, researchers at Singapore University of Technology and Design report on a transformer UAV: one UAV, many different possible copters [1]!
This is a copter that can be configured with 1-4 rotary wings, and with different rotary and pitch angles. Wow!
Some configurations are weirder than others, but their design knows how to fly in 14 different ways. So there!
It’s not so much that there are different ways to fly, but that they have a modular set of hardware that snaps together in multiple ways, and they know how to make all of them fly.
I’m not sure how practical this approach may be. This sort of madly spinning wing is not ideal for passengers or freight, and not great for some kinds of surveillance. And, of course, any given configuration will never match a purpose build UAV.
The main advantages seem to be efficiency (longer flight time) and flexibility. I have to wonder what scenarios would benefit from these features.
One thing the researchers have not explored is swarming. This design makes possible swarms with a flexible mix of copters constructed from the same collective of generic parts.
- Xinyu Cai, Shane Kyi Hla Win, Hitesh Bhardwaj, and Shaohui Foong, Modeling, Control and Implementation of Adaptive Reconfigurable ROtary Wings (ARROWs). IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics:1-11, 2023. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10026627
Robot Wednesday
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