Not much on dihedral in respect to muticopter’s that isn’t 7+ years old. I’ve got an old X8 1400 frame with about 13 degrees of dihedral. That seems excessive lol. It also experiences increased vibrations in forward flight from propeller flapping (I presume). Forward flights is definately where this unit will spend most of it’s time. So should I ditch the dihedral?
great thing about pixhawk is its detailed logging. with that you can do test flights and quantify the downsides such as vibration. if its low enough, you can also try FFT-based auto filtering to see if sensor noise can be removed.
what is the advantage to using dihedral?
Used to be considered almost a passive form of stabilization. An example would be the motor down would be approximately perpendicular whereas the upside would be around 26 degrees off making it less efficient. Kinda like the idea of keeping the center of gravity low… That was a bad idea. I ended up with a 17kg pendulum lol! Rebuilding this beast to be properly centered around the axis of rotation.
well if it ‘used to’, it ‘still should’, too. does it actually work? lol
Dihedral used to be a crutch for bad stabilization boards. ArduCopter is designed around stablizing copters without dihedral. I think I remember the controls expert for ArduPilot saying that dihedral should not be included in copter designs.
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Don Quixote comes to mind. Tilting at Windmills 
Not just Arducopter, look at a line up of DJI machines over the years. The old M600 has a very noticeable dihedral, but the newer M300 is pretty much flat.
