Yuneec’s Lightweight Servo

Although a little older than the up-to-date tech you expect in this blog, Yuneec is emerging as a player in the UAV world, and should be regarded as such. Boasting over 50 patents filed, we found less than that on the USPTO, the present issued patent included.

Size and weight are a bane of any flying object. Reduce weight, and the flying object performs slightly better, flies longer and presumably costs less to make in the long run. Servos are necessary for just about every UAV with the exception of quadcopters. A servo moves a control surface, a tricopters’s tail rotor, or a helicopter’s collective pitch. That makes the servo an essential piece of UAV technology.

Yuneec has invented a way to eliminate key servo components: “The difference between the present invention and the conventional art is that the present invention does not require any traditional potentiometer and eliminates the gear reduction box and the traditional circuit board. The present invention also simplifies the structural configuration by integrating the carbon film of the potentiometer with the circuit board. Therefore, the present invention provides a control servo having the features of simple structural configuration, relatively light weight, and high integration. Most importantly, the weight of the control servo can be significantly reduced so as to be incorporated within smaller and micro scale aircraft so as to advance the development of such model aircraft.”

Claim 1. A control servo for controlling one or more aerofoil surfaces of a remote-controlled model aircraft, comprising: a supporting frame; a motor mounted on said supporting frame; a control slider slidably disposed in said supporting frame adjacent to said motor; a driving shaft coupled with said control slider in such a manner that said control slider is driven by said driving shaft to slide along said driving shaft during a rotation of said driving shaft for controlling the aerofoil surfaces of the model aircraft, wherein said driving shaft is driven to rotate by power output of said motor; and an electric brush provided underneath said control slider.

Title: “CONTROL SERVO”

US Patent No: 7,898,130

Filed (PCT – China): April 17, 2007

Granted: March 1, 2011