Shrediquette - the award-winning multirotors by William Thielicke

This year, the 'International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Flight Competition' ( IMAV2014 ) took place on the 13th of August in the Netherlands. I am very happy to announce that together with my team (called 'Dipole', consisting of Prof. Klaus-Peter Neitzke, Dr. Hans-Peter Thamm and me = William Thielicke), we won the second prize in the IMAV competition! Fifteen international teams accepted the challenge and tried to score points in the simulation of a major natural disaster inside a small artificial village. Several tasks had to be solved during a 30 minute time slot: Creating a stitched orthophoto of the whole village; flying through the village and identifying house numbers and survivors inside the houses; observing a given spot; entering a two-storeyed house and flying through the rooms while identifying objects in the rooms (see the detailed rules here ). Points were awarded for each of these tasks, and summed for the final score. Our team used three d...

Letting the cat out of the bag  The TBS GEMiNi is a small hexrotor that is meant for fpv racing. The frame is based on my Shrediquette GEMiNi that I developed in spring 2013. Team Blacksheep (Trappy, Riscyd and Perna) contacted me a while ago, and we started to modify the design in order to improve it further and to make it more user and crash friendly. After some information had already leaked before the offical release (may it be on purpose or not... ;-D), the new TBS GEMiNi has now been officially announced on fpvlab.com . This means that you can very soon buy the GEMiNi multicopter!   Features of the TBS GEMiNi Forward-tilting motors for efficient, high speed flight Built-in FPV camera (TBS ChipChip V2) Optional HD camera (Mobius Action Cam) CORE OSD/power supply with integrated current sensor Ready for long range FPV Custom 4A ESCs with SimonK firmware Custom T-motors 4" propellers Motor distance: ca. 215 mm = 8.5" Taulabs Quanton-based flight cont...

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...

Maybe you've already heard of the HEXO+ follow-me copter. The kickstarter campaign recently ended and it was really successful. Check it out here: HEXO+ on Kickstarter As you might already guess from the look of this hexrotor, I was involved in designing the airframe and selecting the electrical components for this project. Here are some pictures of early prototypes: The idea was to make something pretty aerodynamic. The booms are flat plates (each is a very stiff and light sandwich of glas fibre / balsa end-grain / glas fibre) that are arranged parallel to the airflow of the propellers (8"). They hence have very low aerodynamic drag, similar to the body of the copter which is tilted 30° with respect to the propeller plane. Unfortunately, my time for supporting the development of the HEXO+ project will be very limited in the future. But as I really like these kind of projects, I'll try to stay involved somehow.

A few weeks ago, I was invited as a guest to the " Große Show der Naturwunder" with Frank Elstner and Ranga Yogeshwar (guests in the show are Guido Cantz , Stefanie Stappenbeck , Marie Bäumer and Horst Lichter . Produced by FirstEntertainment GmbH ). I am giving a short demo flight with the GEMiNi and video goggles. Ranga Yogeshwar also does a short interview with me. The show will be broadcasted on the 31. Juli 2014 at 20.15h in the ARD . It took around 4 days to produce this show, so my partner, my twin (gemini) girls an me spent a very nice week in a lovely hotel in south Germany. I really enjoyed the time over there, it is so interesting to get insights in such kind of TV productions! Here's a description of the "multirotor part" in the show.  I can not show pictures of the show itself or give further details, but here's an image with the host Ranga Yogeshwar (as I expected, I was impressed that he is such a clever and friendly person)  at th...

This morning, I did some wind tunnel tests with the GEMiNi chassis. The GEMiNi was designed for FPV air races at high flight velocities, therefore the aerodynamic properties are important (well, it was also designed to look good of course...). I measured the aerodynamic forces generated by the frame (excluding the influence of the propeller's downwash) at a flight velocity of 12 m/s (= 43 km/h, maybe half the top speed) in a wind tunnel using a 2-axes force balance. Angles of attack between 0 (hovering flight) and 90 degrees (vertical climb) were tested. The angle of attack is defined as the angle between the oncoming flow and the propeller disk. Both the lift coefficient (perpendicular to the oncoming flow) and the drag coefficient (parallel to the oncoming flow) were determined for each angle of attack (n = 3). The coefficients are based on the planform area of the copter. Four different setups were tested: " canopy-tilt- " refers to the hexrotor without can...

Still waiting for the motors and ESCs, I was playing around with the canopy design: Shrediquette GEMïNï from W. Thielicke on Vimeo .

Holidays are copter days... I spent some time during holidays to design a new FPV hexacopter. It will be equipped with the AirAce props that I used in the BOLT and some cheaper hobbyking motors (2200 RPM/V, ca. 15 grs.) + turnigy Plush 6A ESCs + a 1000 mAh 3S lipo. I also designed a canopy for the copter which I will print in 3D, thermoform from 0.5mm plastic sheet, and eventually laminate with carbon fibre. The propellers are tilted 10° forward in order to decrease the angle of attack of the copters body in forward flight, which will hopefully decrease the net aerodynamic drag in fast translational flight. I am hoping that this copter will be able to fly even faster than the BOLT. The GEMiNi is slightly larger, the max. dimension is 315 mm from propeller tip to propeller tip (diagonally). I will use the CCD-Killer camera, and an Airwave module for video transmission. The CCD-Killer is still my favorite camera in terms of image quality and exposure control vs. weight and size. ...

RC-Flight-Control is the german magazine dedicated to first-person-view (FPV) radio controlled flight. In the latest issue (02/2011), there is an eight pages long article about my trip to cameroon . I included some background information about the challenges I was facing during the preparation of the journey and also during my stay in cameroon. One of my aerial photographs also ended up on the cover of the magazine (you can actually see my girl friend and me enjoying the sun on the patio :-D ). The magazine can be ordered online but it is also offered in many book stores at central railway stations.