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.