ICARUS: Reloaded

I will be leaving my life as I know it (in August) and moving to Oak Park IL to start my Masters in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois-Chicago.  For my Masters Thesis I plan on doing something with ICARUS, hopefully it will involve designing, building and developing a quadrotor that is capable of transitioning from a normal hover mode to a more aerodynamic cruise mode.  I have been working on iterative design prototypes, check out some of my work:





Rev A:  Just a concept of what a Tilt Rotor with a Pylon Rotate function could look like.

Rev B:  Rev B was an idea the ICARUS quadrotor would look like a normal quadrotor UAV, i.e. a standard + configuration.  To achieve an efficient cruise transition all 4 rotors would be needed to provide horizontal thrust.  As such, all of the pylons were designed to not only Tilt but able to rotate as well.  This obviously increases the mechanical complexity (along with weight, aerodynamic drag, expense, etc) but it does provide some cool options, such as a more compact storage mode and the full line of Advanced Hover modes as well.









Rev C:  Rev C was an idea instead of the + configuration, to design ICARUS as a X configuration with the ability to rotate the wing assemblies.  This gives a much sleeker transition along with a lowered amount of mechanical complexity.  However, as you can see in the animation below there are losses of inefficiencies with vertical thrust and vertical lift generation.

I hope to eventually combine the best of both worlds to achieve a sleek design of the ICARUS Quadrotor that is capable of an aerodynamic cruise mode.  This may be several iterations to come, so stay tuned!