Tradheli VTOL tilrotor - folley or frig yeah?

@iampete, @bnsgeyer or others, can you comment on the feasibility of getting tradheli into Arduplane VTOL? Specifically tiltrotor, like a V-22 Osprey with real cyclic control (can you imagine a 600 size tradheli quadplane :scream: ).

Is someone working on this, or if I were to look into it, is it a ginormous amount of work, or just some thoughtful merging from Tradheli AC that has never been done due to lack of interest?

Thanks!

There has been some heli VTOL’s before. Nothing ever got into master. Its certainly a big job. But could be done. We would need lots of fixups to plane, for example we currently don’t really care about spool state, on a multi copter the spool is so quick it makes little difference for a heli we have to do it properly.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Ooh yeah that’s an interesting point about spool-up - it’s not ‘just VTOL with swash plates’.

Do you think it’s something that will ever be on the cards without an industry partner pushing it? I.e. if I check back in 12 months will anything have changed?

I would hope that over time the gap will decrease as plane trys to keep up with copter. However it will take significant effort. Either because someone wants to do it for fun, or someone is sponsoring the work.

I would not hold your breath. There are loads of more impact-full improvements that we can make to quadplane.

Hi Patrick,
I hope all is well with you. Long ago before my involvement with ardupilot, I had big dreams of making an RC V-22. I started with two 30 size Miniature Aircraft heli’s. I had a lot of issues with getting the gas engines to run reliably and the cross shafting was a mechanical mess. So I never got that one in the air. I really haven’t thought about pursuing what you are suggesting. @iampete probably knows better than I what hurdles there would be for this integration. Unfortunately I don’t have any plans to do this. I think the next big thing for heli is autonomous, or at least assisted, autorotation.
Regards,
Bill

Hey Bill!
OK yeah all that makes sense - I agree that there are other features that would have a greater impact to much larger audience eg. autorotation.
Thanks for all your work!

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