QuadCopter Design

Airplanes and helicopters have always interested me. At many times, I have had more pressing or fascinating interests, but currently one of my passions is radio control helicopters. While RC airplanes have long held a special place in the lives of retired airline pilots, the field of RC helicopters had recently garnered much attention from a younger, livelier crowd. RC helicopters can be flown much like in a video game, adding to the appeal for younger men and women. Also, a great deal of time and skill must be put into flying a helicopter through various acrobatics and stunts. Along the same lines, I have recently been researching various new designs for a helicopter and have come up with an excellent new design.
This design could potentially revolutionize the world of RC helicopters, along with military unmanned aerial vehicles. The design uses, instead of a conventional main rotor and tail rotor, four duct fans. Duct fans use a more efficient fan blade and a duct around that blade in order to create a large amount of thrust while only using a small amount of power. This means that the ducted fan could be used in place of a conventional helicopter main rotor. The design that I intend to build utilizes four of these duct fans arranged in a rectangular fashion. This will give the aerial vehicle that I am designing the ability to take off vertically from the ground, much like a conventional helicopter. However, unlike traditional helicopter, this design will also have the ability to move the duct fans forward so that all of their thrust moves the plane forwards instead of upwards. This essentially makes them like conventional jet engines, and in this direction the duct fans could potentially travel much faster than a helicopter ever could. To make this device feasible, an automatic system will take the vehicle off of the ground for the user, and then allow the user to fly it like a regular airplane. The advantage of this system is that the user could take virtually any size quad copter off from nearly any place (including backyards, small parks, and living rooms), and then fly it around like a regular RC airplane.
There are, of course, many advantages to an aerial vehicle that can take off vertically and then fly as efficiently as a conventional airplane. This design appeals greatly to a military perspective, as the design could hover anywhere for extended time periods, then fly efficiently to a new location, unlike either an airplane or helicopter.

Aerial Robotics Team

I recently joined the Unmanned Aerial Robotics team at SPSU at the request of a friend, and have enjoyed it ever since. The goal of the team is to create an aerial vehicle, such as a helicopter or airplane, which can complete a certain mission. The mission that our robot must complete involves navigating its way through a building and then finding a USB drive or other small object. The goal is to more or less make a small reconnaissance robot capable of completing its mission, which could be quite different depending on a number of factors, autonomously. In order to satisfy the requirements of the competition, our team is leaning towards a quad copter.
Although at first a quad copter may sound overly complicated, there are actually several reasons why quad copters win out over conventional helicopter designs. Firstly, a quad copter is loosely a helicopter with four sets of rotors, instead of one like in the most popular helicopter designs or two in a Chinook. A rotor is like a large propeller, but acts somewhat differently and is both longer and moves slower through the air. Quad copters use the nuisances of rotors to their advantage in numerous ways. The advantage of four rotors over one or two rotors is that certain tendencies of a single-rotor design disappear. In a single rotor helicopter, the main rotor spins in one direction, propelled by a force from inside the helicopter and the rotor must exert an equal and opposite force. This causes the helicopter to spin in circles along with the rotor, which is why a small propeller is added to the tail of conventional helicopters. The four rotors can be configured such that two rotate in one direction and the other two rotate in the other direction, which cancels out this force. Also, controlling a single rotor helicopter typically requires complicated machinery which changes the pitch of the rotor blades. This allows the helicopter to move forward, backwards, and sideways through the air, but is complex and costly. A quad copter can instead control its direction by speeding up or slowing down one of the rotors on a given side, which causes the quad copter move through the air in a given direction. This requires much less complicated machinery, which keeps costs down and makes the quad copter safer than conventional helicopters. One disadvantage lies in the fact that a conventional helicopter can auto rotate, essentially a controlled crash landing, whereas a quad copter would be unable to without the complex machinery of a conventional helicopter.