This thing is gaining traction and rightly so, although off the bat it looks unwieldy for a drone with distributed electrical propulsion (DEP)... and that's because it isn't.
The motor looks to be from Hirth, a venerable German company that dates back I think to circa WW1 but more recently turned to powering ultralight aircraft with 2-stroke motors.
Details are sketchy, but so far as I can see it drives a hydraulic pump that in turn is distributing pressure to each of the motors; except that those motors are not your regular pressure-driven actuators but digitally-controlled pumps themselves derived from the aerospace industry.
I can tell you that whichever airliner you fly, 'hydraulics' is a sizeable chapter in the manuals as it conventionally provides for practically anything that moves around its outline: landing gear, flight control surfaces, every other surface, generators etc.
These actuators are relatively cheap, decidedly light and super-responsive as you'd expect from a century or more of development. Turning back to drones, which to be able to fly require rapid adjustments to the RPMs of the propellers in each corner, it would appear that this is what they do viz. adjust the underlying hydraulic pressure supplied at source.
It's not the most efficient and pales when compared to a simple drive-shaft; but it is actually an arrangement that is everywhere in the modern world. Look at the fields, and those tractors with skinny legs and wheels to negotiate the crops use systems like this, as do any number of cranes manoeuvring containers around the docks.
What it does here is to provide a reliable means that far exceeds the state of the art when it comes to battery-come-motor solutions. Effectively the only way DEP allows for the range and endurance as such a vehicle as this is to turn it from a helicopter into an aeroplane for the cruise and back again for the landing.
Which is altogether more complicated to do than what you see here.
So well done. I'd offer to do their PR but am too busy doing nothing.
