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A comment on Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second Crash. Parent comment

Re:Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second C... by bigiain on Monday August 05, 2019 @10:28PM (#20621553)
Hexes and octocopters are "safer" than quads - since they can (with appropriate controllers) cope with any one motor/controller out, and some combinations of multiple motors out. (Anyone flying expensive DSLR cameras uses these for that reason.)

There are some quad copter controllers that try to deal with single motor failures, but they're mostly experimental (at least on the hobby end to the space) since they need to be able to reverse a motor, which most motor controllers used in these applications are not build to do.

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Re:Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second C... by asteli on Monday August 05, 2019 @10:39PM (#20621606)
I recall a quadcopter control mode that spins the entire craft quite rapidly, exchanging yaw control for altitude control.

Found a vid: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bsHryqnvyYA

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Re:Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second C... by bigiain on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @04:21AM (#20623273)
Without even clicking that I knew it was gonna be ETH Zurich... They do pure magic. Pretty much nobody _else's_ quadcopters can survive a motor failure... (But it'll come, presumably. Amazing software is cheaper than redundant hardware, after all...)
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Re:Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second C... by toxik on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @08:33AM (#20624532)
Not to detract from how cool this work is but the preconditions for this to work are quite far-reaching. It is based on bridging the reality gap by having that gap approach zero - by removing error sources from the real world rather than model and account for them. Same goes for other ASL work.
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