With the development of its new tiltpod — which the company describes as a compact motor, propeller and servo with a thrusting and tilting function — FlightWave Aerospace Inc. believes that it can effectively eliminate the pitch and roll aspect of quadcopters, which will lead to improved stability for the UAS.

Known for its FlightWave Edge UAS, which is equipped with the tiltpod, FlightWave says that the tiltpod allows an aircraft to hover without tilting its whole body forward, enabling pilots to eliminate pitch and roll. So instead of tilting the aircraft, only the motor would need to be tilted.

According to FlightWave Co-founder and CTO Trent Lukaczyk, eliminating the pitch and roll element of quadcopters during flight will go a long way in the future development of UAS.

“Smooth, stable and non-jostling platforms are essential to unmanned aerial systems taking the next step in aviation,” Lukaczyk tells AUVSI via email. “Eliminating the pitch and roll of quadcopters while they operate is a critical improvement in stability, which we see enabling some pretty incredible technologies in the future.”

Eliminating pitch and roll would also be beneficial for engineers, Lukaczyk says, as they tend to spend a lot of time and effort making their sensors and cameras self-leveling in order to compensate for the pitch and roll of a quadcopter.

With tiltpod-powered UAS, though, there would no longer be a need for different types of sensors and cameras to be self-leveling, making it a lot easier to point a payload at something.

Lukaczyk adds that tiltpod-powered craft are highly maneuverable, which enables quick movement combined with finely tuned, precision control in tight spaces — such as warehouses and manufacturing plants — where there may only be centimeters of clearance available.

‘At the end of this maze we found the tiltpod’

The idea behind the tiltpod started when FlightWave as a company challenged itself to design UAS that didn’t carry the “pain points” of quadcopters, but still retained all the features that made the aircraft wildly successful over the last decade.

“The design challenge started as broad as asking: what is the absolute best way to build an airplane that takes off vertically?” Lukaczyk says.

That question quickly took the FlightWave team down a “maze of other problems,” Lukaczyk says, such as how to free the UAS from the need to pitch and roll to translate horizontally, and thereby eliminate the hassle of adding extra motors to stabilize important payloads like cameras.

“At the end of this maze we found the tiltpod - a compact combination of tilting and thrusting that is just as modular as the common quadcopter motor,” Lukaczyk says. He adds that when the FlightWave team first started flying its UAS with tiltpods, it had an “incredible feeling” that the UAS flew like it was floating around on an air hockey table.

“That’s when we knew we had found something incredible,” Lukaczyk says.

The tiltpod is currently installed on FlightWave’s Edge UAS, and has played an integral role on several missions that the company has conducted recently, including during the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s three-week voyage in 2018 off its R/V Falkor research vessel to study the North Pacific Subtropical Front, 1,000 miles west of California.

‘Build, fly, crash, repeat’

The tiltpod has undergone hundreds of iterations. The process to get the technology where it is today has been fairly straight forward thus far.

“Our process was pretty simple — build, fly, crash, repeat,” Lukaczyk says.

Because the team was designing and building the tiltpod in a garage, the design was fairly simple, but as the FlightWave team learned more and continued to look for more ways to refine it, the team “got much more sophisticated” with the way that it built it. Lukaczyk adds that the team heavily relied on 3-D-printing to iterate quickly and to build parts that normally need a machine shop to build.

All of that experience has proved to be beneficial for the FlightWave team as it continues to move forward with the development of the tiltpod.

“Today we have a really good understanding of how to make them well,” Lukaczyk says, adding that the team is now in a position to expand the kind of aircraft that they build really quickly, such as the company’s Jupiter UAS, which is using tiltpods to “take traditional quadcopters to the next level,” he says.

Exciting future

Having already demonstrated its benefits on the company’s own UAS, FlightWave is well aware of the potential benefits that such technology could offer other types of UAS.

“We see ahead of us an exciting future where tiltpod technology can be transformative to the extent that it even catches the practical imagination of more people in other fields,” Lukaczyk says. “The tiltpod is just one example of innovation within the UAS industry that can move us all from being kind of an exotic niche industry to a mainstream solution for a broad array of organizations.”

Lukaczyk believes the tiltpod can drive the development of the next generation of UAS that can offer revolutionary possibilities to a variety of industries for different tasks, including: fieldwork in agriculture, forestry, geography, geology and marine biology; indoor environments like warehouses and manufacturing plants; and outdoor construction projects.

Lukaczyk adds the company has thought about selling the tiltpod to other UAS manufacturers, but he is cautious about that prospect.

“One thing every drone company needs to wrestle with is the fact that you’re not just building one product, you’re building at least five. This means that we’ve had to solve a lot of problems that each on their own could be solved by a company dedicated to just that,” Lukaczyk says. “There are a lot of components of our aerial systems that could be offered on their own, and maybe someday in the future, we’ll be able to do that.”

With this in mind, FlightWave is dedicated to refining its ideas for one or two systems, which is “a kind of focus that is needed to make sure you start from a solid foundation before branching into other exciting things.” Lukaczyk says.