Comment by jacquesm
5 hours ago
Yes, that's in line with everything I've seen.
I've built a whole slew of drones over the last couple of years, quadcopters are hard to beat on many axis. But I have some proof that it may be possible to do substantially better with a monocopter in terms of efficiency. The hard problems you will then have to solve are payload attachment because unbalance is very tricky to deal with (whereas that is trivial in a quadcopter) as well as transitioning to level flight so that you can make good forward speed.
I think the recent winner of the DARPA life challenge was a 'traditional' single rotor helicopter with tailrotor. The very large disc area of the traditional heli design made it more efficient than quad/hex/octo designs.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=darpa+lif...
I know very little of the field, but aren't there applications where the ability to carry ad hoc payloads doesn't matter? Integrating a fixed sensor suite into the ring and balancing it ahead of time is possible then, right?
And what can be learned from full-scale classical helicopters that frequently carry underhanging payloads?
(I don't at all wanna be the typical HN person who thinks their questions about a field they know nothing about are in any way insightful. I'm just trying to learn.)