Comment by coderenegade
5 hours ago
A fixed wing drone only needs one motor, the control is easier, and the physics are more favorable for carrying high ordnance. I'm skeptical that this is going to change much.
It's cool in that it can hover and do quadcopter type flight with only a single motor, and it's that second part that is interesting, because a fixed wing can also do a prop hang, but it can't do quadrotor-like flight from there.
It's usefulness is likely to be in other areas -- mainly applications where that flight mode is important.
Larger fixed wing drone could deliver many smaller quadcopters that don't have the long range.
A fixed wing drone needs at least one extra motor for the control surfaces. More likely two or three.
This design still requires an additional servo for rotor actuation, so the minimum number of actuators is the same as for a fixed wing (roll and yaw are coupled, so the bare minimum is a single rudder servo).
No, the rotors are tilted by timing the acceleration from the single motor - there's no servo in the design in the video.