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February 19, 2018

Things One Can Learn by Putting a Quadcopter in a Vaccuum Chamber

Eric J Ayars

Darwin 103
3:00 PM

Quadcopters (also known as “drones”) do not fly in vacuum. This is obvious enough that experimenting on one in a vacuum chamber would seem rather uninteresting, but there is one question that Eric J Ayars will address by such an experiment: the mechanism for yaw control. Quadcopters control yaw (rotation about the vertical axis) by differential rotor speed, and the question of whether those changes in rotor speed create yaw torque via conservation of angular momentum or via atmospheric drag can be addressed by “flying” a quadcopter in a vacuum where there is effectively zero atmospheric drag.