MIT Is Testing A 'Hybrid' Drone That Can Both Hover And Glide

Currently, drones have become one of the most advanced consumer technologies in the world. Though in the past, you only heard about drones being associated with the military on the news who used it exclusively as a weapon and surveillance platform. Now, though, it’s everywhere and can be bought with as low a price tag as Rs 6,886 carrying a camera for photographing, video recording, and yes, even surveillance.

There are two types of drones: models with fixed-wings looking like airplanes, and multicopters resembling hovering squares.

Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a platform that combines the strengths of both types: A hybrid, fixed-wing drone. The new development can give drones the ability to both hover and glide similar to an aeroplane.

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Hybrid Drone

These hybrid drones can take off and land vertically just like multi-copters, but still, they can be as energy efficient as fixed-wing drones. Of course, nothing ever goes without a trade-off. Because engineers have to fashion everything from the design, the software, down to the control surfaces from scratch, the process of making the drone itself is time-consuming and quite expensive. 

Jie Xu - an MIT CSAIL grad student and her team are attempting a ‘Build-a-Drone’ approach. In short, their plan is to create a process that even non-experts can design a drone on their own in accordance to their specific needs then wait a couple of hours for a computer to calibrate the controller. After the calibration is finished, the user should be able to walk away with a ready to fly drone.

Xu is also the leading author of the paper on the subject set to be presented later this month. Writing on MIT’s website, she wrote that the aim of the project is to make such hybrid drones more accessible to everyone.

Build-A-Drone

In the case of hybrid drones, engineers have to manually create three sets of controllers for the machine. The hover, helicopter-like flight mode, the aeroplane flight mode, and lastly, the transition phase that allows the user to switch back and forth between the two modes. Of course, this can be an extremely difficult challenge for non-experts who do not have the necessary technical knowledge to complete such a feat. That’s the reason why CSAIL opted to forego this step altogether and rely on neural networks to compute and calibrate an optimal flight controller for all three regimes.

To allow users to create a unique drone design that they would like to have, the team uses Onshape, a system the team created that users can access and build their own drones based on a part list. After the design phase is finished, the design is run through a simulated gauntlet within the program’s simulator to see whether it could fly and fly how well.

Even though neural networks is a popular tool among researchers in simulations. Most of the results derived from these networks usually do not hold up in the rigor of the real world. What the CSAIL team is trying to accomplish is bridging a ‘gap’ between the simulation and the real world.

Limitations And Future

The design set forth by the team does have limits, however. It cannot take into account sophisticated aerodynamic concepts such as the interaction between the propellers with the wings. Or have the ability to perform sharp turns. Of course, for such a project, being able to fly at all is a monumental achievement. The team hopes that in the future, the drone’s capability and maneuverability can be perfected. Insofar practical flight, the model has performed quite well in both simulation and in real-world flight, so there’s hope yet for a hybridized design appearing in the consumer market of the future.