Micro-Drone Rolls, Flies, Gathers Intel

Although this looks like a toy called the “Sky Walker”, this drone is far from it. The Applicant, l’INSTITUT SUPERIEUR DE L’AERONAUTIQUE ET DE L’ESPACE, funded by the French Ministry of Defense, has invented a little drone to gather recon inside buildings. It was built as a “multi-mission microscale aerial vehicle. It comprises elements allowing a microscale aerial vehicle to move or roll across a surface, in particular on the ground, and making it capable of taking off again once from the ground.”

It can roll on two large wheels or fly, propulsed by two propellers. On the ground, it behaves as a tail-dragger, and in the air it behaves like a plane. It takes off vertically by folding its elevons and pointing its nose up, and can fly in 3-D, or like a quad, since the propellers are counter-rotating. “The described microdrone has the ability to switch between horizontal and vertical flight. This is in part due to the counter-rotating propellers. Moreover, by using propellers in a tractor configuration, it is possible to compensate for the loss of effectiveness of the control surfaces in near-stationary vertical flight (due to the airspeed of the vehicle being zero) in that these propellers generate an airflow over these control surfaces.”

In the preferred embodiment, the wingspan is 30cm, or about a foot. The fact that it can “move on the ground makes it possible to save energy and thus to increase mission times for the vehicle.”

Title: “REMOTELY CONTROLLED MICRO/NANOSCALE AERIAL VEHICLE COMPRISING A SYSTEM FOR TRAVELING ON THE GROUND, VERTICAL TAKEOFF, AND LANDING”

US Patent Application Publication No: 20140319266

Filed (PCT): March 27, 2012

Published: October 30, 2014