[Tom Stanton] Builds An Osprey

The V-22 Osprey is an aircraft like no other. The tiltrotor multirole military aircraft makes an impression wherever it goes coincidentally, a flight of two of these beasts flew directly overhead yesterday and produced a noise compared with everything we’ve ever listened to prior to. It is a intricate aircraft that pushes the engineering envelope, so normally [Tom Stanton] made a decision to build a flight-regulate correct RC design of the Osprey for himself.

Sharp-eyed readers will no question observe that [Tom] developed an Osprey-like VTOL design just lately to investigate the fundamental principles of tiltrotor style. But his goal with this construct is to go past the essentials by replicating some of the command complexity of a full-scale Osprey, with out breaking the financial institution. Instead of constructing or obtaining true swash plates to handle the collective and cyclic pitch of the rotors, [Tom] utilised his “virtual swashplate” approach, which uses angled hinges and rapid modifications in the angular momentum of the motors to reach blade pitch handle. The interesting section is that the very same system labored soon after including a 3rd blade to every single rotor, to mimic the Osprey’s blades — we’d have thought this would throw the entire point off stability. Real, there ended up some resonance issues with the airframe, but [Tom] was able to overcome them and achieve a thing shut to secure flight.

The video clip down below is only the initially element of his make collection, but we suspect incorporates most of the interesting engineering bits. Even now, we’re seeking ahead to observing how the manage system evolves as the style course of action carries on.