DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio

egormakarov•33 minutes ago

YouTube playlist linked on DARPA site: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6wMum5UsYvbuxFAptr9LYCnd...

VBprogrammer•11 minutes ago

A nearly 4:1 ratio makes a 25kg drone very interesting from a personal mobility perspective. Something you could fly a few miles with and then easily roll around an office. Sadly scaling in aerodynamics is notoriously non-linear.

bart__•about 2 hours ago

Interesting event, annoyingly bad written AI article

camkego•about 2 hours ago

Slop city, it felt like I was having an LLM chat.

flyinglizard•about 1 hour ago

This is the honest take.

rob74•about 1 hour ago

Winning $ 1.25 million is great - but I wonder how they feel about not getting the full $ 2.5 million prize because they missed the 4:1 target by 4% ?

lnenad•36 minutes ago

They've probably got companies lined up to give them jobs that will pay multiples of those. The runner up is even more interesting, with a slightly larger reason to feel like they should have won it. They did ~3nm (out of 4 iirc) of 4.04:1 ratio.

Leonard_of_Q•36 minutes ago

They probably feel like the athlete who missed breaking a record, like the shipping company which just failed to load the goods in 4 trucks and now needs 5, like the painter who just needed that extra 50 cm on his ladder: "darn, so close".

rob74•17 minutes ago

"Close, but only half the cigar"

dyauspitr•about 1 hour ago

Hunh so for pure lifting our standard helicopter design is apparently the best. How did we stumble on the perfect design half a century ago? Was it sheer luck and constraints or can you actually do the math for this to work it out?

somat•20 minutes ago

I am surprised it was not a coaxial design(think the mars copter, but designed for a real atmosphere)

regularfry•about 1 hour ago

The article makes reference to this being expected from the physics, but I don't think it's particularly intuitive why it should be the case. Unless it's as simple as smaller swept areas needing higher tip speeds for the same lift? That would make the energy loss to drag worse for multirotors.

snovv_crash•33 minutes ago

Higher aspect ratio blades are more efficient. It maximises disc area for a given mass of blade (linear-squared relationship). Blade is held straight due to tension not purely from torsional strength, so it can be made from a material with high tension strength like carbon fibre which is light. Also it positions the fastest moving blade area far out from the fuselage where there is less blown-drag.

The downside is that the tail rotor is purely loss.

Potentially a similar efficiency could be achieved with two large rotors, but then you end up needing to use cyclic roll to counter drag-induced cyclic yaw, or adding extra pitch mechanisms on each motor mount to make differential yaw.

whatever1•about 1 hour ago

We have also achieved optimal teapot design for perfect flow thousands of years ago.

We have some times very good intuition and ideas.

DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio

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