A Drone Sprouts Wings

While there are some fixed-wing drones in the hobby world, most of us around here think of the quadcopter when this word is mentioned. There have been some fixed-wings around, and lots of multi-rotors, but not much of a mix of the two. [Paweł] wanted to see what would happen if he mixed these two together, and created a quadcopter drone with retractable wings, essentially just to see what would happen.

This isn’t something that can convert from fixed-wing flight to helicopter-style hovering like a V22 Osprey or Harrier, either. The lift and thrust is entirely generated by the rotors, and the “wings” are essentially deployable air brakes that allow the drone to slow down quickly without consuming as much energy under propeller power alone. The air brake wings are designed to automatically deploy as a function of throttle position, too, so there’s a lot that could be built on this idea in the future, in theory.

[Paweł] notes that this design is somewhat controversial, and although few of us are in the drone racing community we can imagine how a functional change like this might impact in an arena such as that. He also only saw marginal performance increases and isn’t planning on perusing this idea much further. If you’re interested in a drone with “true” wings, though, check out this one which gets fired out of a grenade launcher.