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Looking at their latest invention, Mark Cutler and Jonathan P. Howe will get an awesome job at some military aerospace company. They have created a quadrotor drone with variable-pitch, something that didn’t exist before in these kind of machines. Not they can do some crazy acrobatics.
Go to minute 1:25 to see the cool action but, if you have time, watch the comparison at the beginning
The variable-pitch propellers allow for more aggressive maneuvers and aerobatics than possible with typical fixed-pitch quadrotors.
Full-sized helicopters have variable-pitch propellers, which allow them to do some aggressive maneuvers too. Their quadcopter is just the same and can do even more things. It can stop almost on the spot, fly upside down and basically move in any way you can imagine with absolute precision—much more precise than anything invented to date.
Now I want one for my birthday. [Hackaday]
Buzzing a Moose With a Quadcopter Is the Safest Way To Enjoy Nature
Quadcopter Fleet Builds the Leaning Tower of Styrofoam
The Impossible Project
It’s stuff like this that really makes me wish i was doing my engineering degree at MIT!!
If they made this full size with a gyroscopically stable ball shaped cockpit in the middle for a pilot, you’d have something really bad ass.
Yep. Would still be pretty bad ass to see this equipped with a camera and laser beams. I don’t know why laser beams, missiles just didn’t seem exciting enough.
It’s all visually stimulating etc. But is this the future – propellers?
Replacing propellers with something similar to Dyson’s bladeless fan would be awesome. I’m not sure if it’s possible, but it sounds cool.