There's no way I would ever get in one of these death traps. If something goes wrong, they can't glide and they can't autorotate.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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The most common incident cause in aviation is engine failure. Drones like these have separate engines for each rotor. 6 engines have to fail at the same time, I guess the chance for that is small. Also they use DC engines, which are much more simpler and reliable than internal combustion engines.
I'm not saying this will be definitely safer, but simply the lack of ability to glide or autorotate does not make them automatically super unsafe.
Lol, if one enginge fails, it needs to compensate for not only the lack of lift, but also the loss of tourqe for steering.
So no, you don't have six failsafes, you have 6 possible points of failure
During autorotation you also can't steer, just want to get down safely. It's an emergency situation, you don't want to fly nicely, just land and not die.
Power compensation is a software/math problem. They can design bigger engines to compensate for the failure of some engines. Again in a situation like that you don't want a super pleasant flight you just want to survive.
(Following your logic, a motorcycle is more safe than a car, because it has only 2 wheels)
The point is we don't know, and it's not impossible. I guess Toyota has some engineers who could help in the decision.
Following your logic, a motorcycle is more safe than a car, because it has only 2 wheels
What?
That isn't my logic at all.
I simply stated that six enginges in this configuration does not mean that is is failsafe.
A car with four wheels can get puncture in four wheels, so you have more points of failure than a motorcycle.
We can build helicopters with one engine. Adding five more engines doesn't necessarily 5 points of failures but 5 backup engines. I tried to point out that your example is not exactly right in this case.
Sigh, with regards to drones, they use the torque from the motor to steer, they are also very finely balanced, so a motor dying in flight will make it fall from the sky.
Now, this is clearly different from this device as it has (small) wings and the engines in the picture are all pointing diagonally in the same way, meaning that some lift is generated by the wings.
It might be enough to land in an emergency if an engine quits.
But a normal quad or even a hexa drone will just crash or start spinning if one engine quits.
But I am man enough to be swayed by evidence, so show me a drone with one engine quitting mid flight that doesn't just crash.
I don't know man, you should ask Toyota engineers who just payed $500M for this flying coffin. They should be really stupid for doing that,
Oh you wanted proof, quick search says here Ardupilot firmware could handle 1 motor loss with 5+ rotors in 2018: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/handling-motor-loss/32359
And a seven years old video of a home made hexacopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap8ngQqt7s8
Ah, nice, I did not know that!
Thank you for sharing the video, cool!
That being said, it is one failsafe, for normal drones, but after looking further at the image of the Toyota concept, I can sort of see what you mean, as it is a different construction to that of a normal drone.