Hi,
I'm in the process to start building a nitro quadrotor, using a 0.61 ASP engine. The plan is to keep the rotors at a constant speed, while varying the pitch of the rotor blades to change the thrust and torque. The sensors that I'm going to use a standard 6 degree of freedom IMU and a small CCD camera as a horizon detector (still wondering if it is necessary). The control algorithm will be developed in Matlab and exported to a PIC chip.

I'm currently busy to do preliminary sizing calculations to figure out how big the whole thing will be and I'm busy to build test benches to measure to pitch/torque and pitch/thrust ratios.

Has anyone done this before? [&:]

Hi PhilipOos,
It is always interressant that there are poeple who build this type of flying machine.
I built a big turbine QuadRotor, for control only radio's mixing programmes are used (Futaba T14MZ).
I'll be happy to correspond with you about your project.
Regards Charly 12
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Updates??

@charly 12,

great job, do you have more pics or any videos?
your project is very interesting!

Greetz
Hammer

Hi, if you're going to have variable pitch rotors, ie. normal nitro helicopter rotors?, then why have 4? the whole idea (as far as I understand it) of the 4 rotor system is to avoid the need for the mechanical complexities of variable pitch, so you only need to vary the relative speeds of the rotors for control.
This isn't to critisise, I'm just interested why you would go this particular route?
good luck with it anyway

Targit, I'll bet the answer is something like "Because it looks cool!" or "Because I wanted to see if it could be done..."

The other answer, of course, is that with one motor (presumably?) and four rotors to spin, variable pitch is the only reasonable answer for controlling the rotors. The necessary transmission to allow for RPM-based control would be fairly complicated, I'd think.

I'd love to hear more about this, but the original posts are from January, so who knows...?

Will