Picking up where we left off, what have we learned over the past six-something years?
Let's take the long view, as ever. In the week's news, songwriters' fears over their roles being substituted by AI. In Huxley's eponymous Brave New World, posited over ninety-five years ago, the songs were composed by computer... takes longer than you'd think.
We've successfully flown now with both four and eight props in the overhead and with four beneath the feet. We've also flown most recently with four in the overhead along with four around the feet. What the latter proved however was that the frame needed to be decidedly rigid in order for the flight-control computer to address the motors at each corner of a virtual cube.
That meant more both more weight, more expense and (quite literally) less flexibility.
Meantimes the eVTOL world has evolved into multi-seat multicopters at the scale of 'flying taxis' and a plethora of personal air vehicles of all shapes and sizes, although generally featuring reclining accommodation as per either the Blackfly or Jetson types that are (perhaps not coincidentally) nearest production.
Accordingly if an upright vehicle is to quite literally stand out from the crowd, then it has to be the most compact on the street and so far as TELEDRONE is concerned, not least because of the budget, that means we need to lose the phone-box.
As a consequence let's turn to a notion which arose in the workshop mid-pandemic, and which I've released publicly at https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/6751 and whose principal benefit as that it is field-deployable in portable parts. We've looked at any number of propeller layouts along the way ~ each having pros and cons ~ but for our 2024 build I'll use the most compact I've yet devised.
Again it is able to support either four or eight motors but either way it was revealed to an adoring public just last year in the shape of UK registered design #6256068.
I hope you like it.
