This is an early test flight of an “Omnicopter” from EAMS Lab. It is a hexacopter but the blades are leaned at about 30degrees which, when used with a new motor mixer, allows the vehicle to move horizontally without leaning.
The vehicle consumes more battery power than a regular hexacopter because of the lean angle of the blades but in some early tests it’s not as bad as expected (10% ~ 15%).
The potential advantage of the frame is that it can move without leaning which might remove the need for a gimbal for some payloads and it does this without the addition of any extra hardware meaning it should hopefully be as reliable as a regular hexacopter.
The two people who have flown the frame so far report that it is a little disconcerting at first to not have it lean and it makes it even more difficult than normal to know which direction the vehicle is pointing in.
P.S. the motor mixer is still in development but if all goes well it should be released in a future version of ArduPilot. This development was mostly done by Yamaguchi-san who is a graduate and teacher at the Drone Japan school