New drone is quadcopter-plane hybrid

[Redbelly98]

I saw this on Yahoo news earlier today.
http://news.yahoo.com/belgian-drone...433f07605&bcmt_s=u#mediacommentsugc_container
From the article:

The University of Leuven team behind VertiKUL 2 (KUL is the acronym for Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) say the drone combines the ability of quadcopters to take-off and land vertically with both the speed of conventional aircraft and their capacity to fly long distances.
By adding wings to a multi-rotor and enabling a transition between hover and cruise flight they say they were able to decrease the required power for flying at high speeds.

The article is sadly lacking any photos of the drone, but a google image search on "vertikul" brought me to this 2-1/2 minute youtube clip:


I presume the tilting ability comes from adjusting the relative thrust of the for and aft rotors. I imagine this requires the center of mass to be located in or very close to the plane of the rotors -- or maybe slightly below, for vertical stability.

 

[mfb]

I imagine this requires the center of mass to be located in or very close to the plane of the rotors -- or maybe slightly below, for vertical stability.

For helicopters and rockets, this does not matter. The force vector tilts together with the body, so without active control the system is not stable independent of the center of mass location.