Definitely not a new form factor, this has been around for donkeys. I've personally seen them for at least 20 years at various industry shows.<p>This is presumably a totally uncritical lazy press release copy paste. For goodness sake, NASA's Ingenuity is not exactly a secret and that's only the latest in a very long line of commercial coaxial UAS.<p>Looks like a perfectly nice coax, but exactly the same tradeoffs of much higher mechanical complexity for a slightly smaller operating footprint which make them less appealing for most use cases. The article completely glosses over the fact that most traditional X/+ designs fold for transport.
> Stacking the two rotors generates more thrust per unit area<p>But that's not a thing, and that's also not how that works. Multicopter rotor design is incredibly subtle.<p>(Two basic ideas for quad copters are that they need to slowly move horizontally for maximum efficiency, and that the vertical stagger between front and rear pair of rotors matters a lot.)<p>At the end of the day, this design is exactly what it is: Looks like a bottle which might be nice for someone. And the whole general layout thing boils down to flight time, in its weight class, with a given payload weight. There's not much more to it.
Though, how do they control cyclic?<p>Is there a swashplate or something that I do not see, or is it as I assume, some kind of mechanism that allows cyclic to be controlled implicitly by motor speed? Edit: The patent apparently says they have a swashplate and cyclic control on the bottom rotor, so it's basically a model helicopter.<p>They can't patent the coaxial bit just by adding the 'on a UAV', so they patent their way of having the blades collapse.
> Ascent's Helius may make the quadrotor form obsolete<p>We didn’t kill all the horses when we invented cars, as always the world just gets more complex. Quadcopters have an edge on this in terms of agility so many use cases will still be served by quadcopters
Standard 4-engine copter is VERY simple hardware wise - 4x blades+engines attached directly to a frame, plus some orientation sensors stolen from a phone. And that's enough to maneuver in any direction with ease, with turning radius of zero. That's why the whole industry is booming
Ugh I hate those videos that each went to full screen and had to be closed for me to continue READING<p>I don’t even want em to autoplay much less auto-full-screen
Sorry but this is overpriced crap, maybe good for US army buying thousands of these, because someone knows someone in government.<p>But if you really want to see proven drone designs, which are upgraded by war experience, just look at Ukraine drone units. That's it.