Have this article read to you at https://youtu.be/CF4TBfaOpcY A typical drone has to tilt into the direction of flight, but why not just tilt its engines? What if you need the drone to remain oriented to the horizontal plane during flight? This invention proposes a solution. Aerbots has patented a system of omnidirectional propeller housings […]
Have this article read to you at https://youtu.be/8NtnwJD1JOc It took some outside-the-box thinking by the folks at Aurora, a Boeing-owned company, to arrive at this invention. They asked the question “but Why are drones so loud?” The answer is not so simple: constructive interference. When a propeller spins, it has a noise profile. This noise […]
Have this article read to you at https://youtu.be/aoDwIFxnuik This may be old news, but let’s look at the toroidal propeller patent from 2020. It is a valiant attempt to make drones more palatable for the general public. The idea came from the “ring wing” design, an airplane with a wing in the shape of a […]
In the early days of aviation, planes used pusher propellers. A pusher prop is typically behind the wing, and the concept probably came from boating, with the ship’s screws located on the stern to push the vessel through water. It took a few years for aerospace engineers to realize that puller props (mounted on the […]
The Osprey is a problematic animal. Not the bird, the aircraft. It took many years and 36 lives (to date) to design a tilt-propeller ship that can take off like a helicopter and fly like an airplane. What if there is a better design? King Abdullah of Jordan thinks so. A recently-granted US Patent discloses a […]
Clockwise prop for the clockwise motor, counterclockwise prop for the counterclockwise motor Patent.
Parrot, the French company that gave us the precursor consumer drone, has filed for a patent application on propeller mounting means. I know first-hand the frustration of seeing a prop fly off a spindle in mid-air, where it goes nobody knows, but it’s somewhere in the lawn. The bird in question is the new Parrot […]