I had a similar project on Kickstarter.
<a href="https://youtu.be/xRviasOMCvk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/xRviasOMCvk</a><p>We made 300k$ but then dropped the project and gave money back to backers.
Basically beyond the "damn cool" effect there is no edge over quadcopter. It is less efficient. You gain something by the duct effect but the duct is heavy. It is very noisy. More sensitive to wind, especially when you try to reduce weight to make something affordable to build and sell. The only benefit was safety due to ducted fan but the point vanishes against mini drone the size of your hand like latest dji.<p>But for sure it s dann cool and fun tech to master. Kudos!
Wow, it seemed straight forward for the first 10 minutes or so, when he introduced the biggest challenge: gyroscopic motion due to the high speed rotation. this is a gripping video.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that found this project fascinating (see my <a href="http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-robotics-4" rel="nofollow">http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-robotics-4</a>).<p>If you are interested in drones/robotics then it's very well worth it to watch this video. You can learn a lot from the author.
I wonder how much more power you can provide it to lift a human for a say half an hour.<p>I've always wanted to build a jetpack like that from xDubai [0]. This is definitely easier to build for an amateur compared to the one professionally built in the video.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VPvKl6ezyc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VPvKl6ezyc</a>
In the future I have a feeling that's the sound you hear before death is approaching in a battlefield. Much the same way as the sound of jets overhead or the squeal of dive bombers in WW2 or the whistling of artillery in WW1.
As I understand, much of the difficulty controlling this comes from the gyroscopic effect. So wouldn't it be feasable to add a gearbox and a secondary rotary mass to cancel out the angular momentum? If you spin the secondary mass fast enough it also wouldn't add that much weight.