Shrediquette - the award-winning multirotors by William Thielicke

The 2014 International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Competition ( IMAV 2014 ) will take place on August 12-15 in Delft, The Netherlands. I am very happy that I can join this event again this year (after my longer 'baby-break' last year). Just as in the previous IMAV competitions, I'll team up with Tumba. He will use several autonomous and FPV-controlled "Alpha" quadrotors and I will take some FPV BOLTs and GEMiNis with me. This year, the competition is especially fun, because the organization committee from TU Delft decided to combine the indoor and outdoor competitions in a single event. Tasks include to create a photomap of a village, detect obstacles, street numbers and open windows, and to finally enter some houses and explore the rooms. This might be pretty challenging, depending on the wind conditions and the video link quality. You can have a look at the competition rules here. I am very much looking forward to the event, and I expect to see...

RC Flight Control 3/2012 title page In the latest issue of the "RC Flight Control", there is an article about my BOLT Y6 hexacopter. The article is about how and why I designed the copter and there are some details about my previous copters. Paul again shot some nice photos, one of them is on the title page. A preview of the magazine is available here: RC Flight Control PDF Preview 3/2012 At least in Germany you should be able to get a copy of this magazine in every larger newspaper store.

Results: 1st place indoor pylon challenge 1st place indoor exploration mission >= 4th place outdoor mission Special award: KLPD user trophy (best operational MAV) 2nd place endurance mission The 12th -15th of september 2011 was IMAV time again... The IMAV2011 is an international conference and flight competition for micro air vehicles . This year it took place in 't Harde (The Netherlands). We (a group of five hobbyists that are also members of the academic flight club Bremen) participated in the outdoor and indoor competitions, and I also had the opportunity to give a talk about some of my PhD work. Antenna tests I took my BOLT with me, and Tumba, one of my team members, took his " Zecke " and a fully autonomous " Ninja " to the competitions (his copters are also 100% built from scratch). For the outdoor competition, we had to fly 500m away and identify some things. With our standard video equipment, this seemed to be impossible, so w...

The latest project, a tiny Y6 hexrotor, is airborne...! I am really happy with the results, the copter is great fun to fly. Here is a video of it (it seems to be really hard to film it in flight...): Shrediquette BOLT from W. Thielicke on Vimeo I will use it mainly for FPV. The little thing becomes pretty fast for its size, it is very precise and fits through the smallest holes... It does even fly pretty ok when one propeller is missing.   Some details on this copter (more pictures on the BOLT page ): BOLT: Compact Y6 FPV hexrotor / hexacopter Max. dimension 21 cm Motor shaft distance 10.6 cm Roxxy 1815/25 Airace propellers "CCD-Killer" CMOS FPV camera mGUIDE controller Turnigy Plush 6A ESCs + I²C->PWM micro converters 3S 1000 mAh battery