Hi Team,
we need to implement a new vehicle type as 4 rotor cyclocopter.
Here we have for each rotor 2 servos for thrust vectoring and amount, and one motor.
What is the best way to build such a new vehicle type? And hints welcome.
Best
Timo
Probably the first step would to be get it flying on the HeliQuad firmware. This would just be thrust for each rotor not vectoring.
Variable pitch is a possible way. Good point for first hovering. We need thrust vectoring at least for yaw control then.
Looks like a traditional helicopter would win on efficiency, complexity and reliability.
… as the helicopter (especially a coax one) does over any other multicopter / drone, right.
Not asking to promote one technology over another, just want to know how to implement a new vehicle type.
… we left that pure mechanical age in advance of the digital century 
I suppose you could view each rotor simply as a tilting propeller with throttle control. That probably wouldn’t require any special coding.
With the tilting effect we can simulate the thrust vectoring, with the thrust amount. The setting of thrust is - as with a helicopter or a variable pitch airplane - more or less static and done by the AoA of the blades.
So (perhaps) a mixing / combination of thrust over the ESCs and AoA would do … hmmm …
For yawing the thrust vectoring must differ for each side of the vehicle.
You could probably configure a tiltrotor quadplane to do that, since it supports vectored yaw with tilt.
ok, then yaw is possible …
Is there an option for tilting VARIABLE PITCH propeller … then we are fine!
No, but I think you could simulate it by setting motor/propeller parameters to mimic collective pitch with throttle.
Can you explain some more details how to do this? Logically speaking one can use the thrust input signal and route it to pitch change on the rotor …
Would I then have to use a channel to start engine, say static 80%. Then use the thrust lever to change collective pitch?
That’s precisely what I was thinking. You could just use RC passthrough to control motor speed, and the throttle channel would control collective pitch.
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Thanks Mark for guidance! … I will give feedback when hardware is build … waiting still for components … the documentation for the tilt rotor quad looks good … actually more than enough to have a good and safe maiden flight
You’re quite welcome, and I’m glad you like the documentation. Please let us know if you see any need for corrections or improvements.
Will do for sure … great work!