I can’t find the videos or channel because google search is so useless these days. But I have seen some DIY drone designs that used unusual configurations. One that comes to mind was a triangle/y shaped tri rotor drone that cut power to one “arm” and basically switched modes like a tilt rotor airplane. By using the upper two motor supports as wings to generate lift it was able to fly forward with lift at one third the power… and i think they used some clever torque balancing between the arms to get a similar effect as traditional counter rotating propellers.
There’s a lot of innovation going on in DIY drone design at the moment, the challenge is actually finding it and following it as it’s all distributed across random reddits, forums, social feeds, patreon updates, and YouTube channels… I’m sure someone dedicated to following the field can probably keep on top of it but I’m more of a space nerd than an airplane nerd so i get exposure to these neat designs mostly by random chance due to lots of the various social and search algorithms lumping everything under “aerospace”.
If I’m remembering it correctly he was experimenting with the drone not having a preference for which motor support arm was “down” and having the drone control software automatically transition based on the current attitude and velocity, so he could “drop” to forward flight mode and have one arm dip, or manually fly it “over” into the mode and have it switch automatically. Seemed very clever. But while it was in “tri-rotor” mode it had similar aerodynamic properties to the X shaped wing designs due to the Y shaped wing design also having symmetry around the roll axis.
There’s a lot of innovation going on in DIY drone design at the moment, the challenge is actually finding it and following it as it’s all distributed across random reddits, forums, social feeds, patreon updates, and YouTube channels… I’m sure someone dedicated to following the field can probably keep on top of it but I’m more of a space nerd than an airplane nerd so i get exposure to these neat designs mostly by random chance due to lots of the various social and search algorithms lumping everything under “aerospace”.
If I’m remembering it correctly he was experimenting with the drone not having a preference for which motor support arm was “down” and having the drone control software automatically transition based on the current attitude and velocity, so he could “drop” to forward flight mode and have one arm dip, or manually fly it “over” into the mode and have it switch automatically. Seemed very clever. But while it was in “tri-rotor” mode it had similar aerodynamic properties to the X shaped wing designs due to the Y shaped wing design also having symmetry around the roll axis.