Drone History

Early attempts

Breguet-Richet Gyroplane (1907)

A four-rotor helicopter designed by Louis Breguet. This was the first rotary wing aircraft to lift itself off the ground, although only in tethered flight at an altitude of a few feet. In 1908 it was reported as having flown 'several times', although details are sparse.^[11]

Oehmichen No.2 (1920)

Etienne Oehmichen experimented with rotorcraft designs in the 1920s. Among the six designs he tried, his helicopter No.2 had four rotors and eight propellers, all driven by a single engine. The Oehmichen No.2 used a steel-tube frame, with two-bladed rotors at the ends of the four arms. The angle of these blades could be varied by warping. Five of the propellers, spinning in the horizontal plane, stabilized the machine laterally. Another propeller was mounted at the nose for steering. The remaining pair of propellers functioned as its forward propulsion. The aircraft exhibited a considerable degree of stability and increase in control-accuracy for its time, and made over a thousand test flights during the middle 1920s. By 1923 it was able to remain airborne for several minutes at a time, and on April 14, 1924 it established the first-ever FAI distance record for helicopters of 360 m (390 yd). It demonstrated the ability to complete a circular course^[12] and later, it completed the first 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) closed-circuit flight by a rotorcraft.

de Bothezat helicopter (1922)

Dr. George de Bothezat and Ivan Jerome developed this aircraft, with six-bladed rotors at the end of an X-shaped structure. Two small propellers with variable pitch were used for thrust and yaw control. The vehicle used collective pitch control. Built by the US Air Service, it made its first flight in October 1922. About 100 flights were made by the end of 1923. The highest it ever reached was about 5 m (16 ft 5 in). Although demonstrating feasibility, it was underpowered, unresponsive, mechanically complex and susceptible to reliability problems. Pilot workload was too high during hover to attempt lateral motion.

Convertawings Model A Quadrotor (1956)

This unique helicopter was intended to be the prototype for a line of much larger civil and military quadrotor helicopters. The design featured two engines driving four rotors through a system of v belts. No tailrotor was needed and control was obtained by varying the thrust between rotors.^[13] Flown successfully many times in the mid-1950s, this helicopter proved the quadrotor design and it was also the first four-rotor helicopter to demonstrate successful forward flight. Due to a lack of orders for commercial or military versions however, the project was terminated. Convertawings proposed a Model E that would have a maximum weight of 42,000 lb (19 t) with a payload of 10,900 lb (4.9 t) over 300 miles and at up to 173 mph (278 km/h). The Hanson Elastic Articulated (EA) bearingless rotor grew out of work done in the early 1960s at Lockheed California by Thomas F. Hanson, who had previously worked at Convertawings on the quadrotor's rotor design and control system.^[14][15]

Curtiss-Wright VZ-7 (1958)

The Curtiss-Wright VZ-7 was a VTOL aircraft designed by the Curtiss-Wright company for the US Army. The VZ-7 was controlled by changing the thrust of each of the four propellers.

Recent developments

In the last few decades, small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles have been used for many applications. The need for aircraft with greater maneuverability and hovering ability has led to a rise in quadcopter research. The four-rotor design allows quadcopters to be relatively simple in design yet highly reliable and maneuverable. Research is continuing to increase the abilities of quadcopters by making advances in multi-craft communication, environment exploration, and maneuverability. If these developing qualities can be combined, quadcopters would be capable of advanced autonomous missions that are currently not possible with other vehicles.^[16]

Some current programs include:

• The Bell Boeing Quad TiltRotor concept takes the fixed quadcopter concept further by combining it with the tilt rotor concept for a proposed C-130 sized military transport.

• AeroQuad and ArduCopter are open-source hardware and software projects based on Arduino for the DIY construction of quadcopters.^[17][18]
• Parrot AR.Drone is a small radio controlled quadcopter with cameras attached to it built by Parrot SA, designed to be controllable by smartphones or tablet devices.^[19][20]
• Nixie is a small camera-equipped drone that can be worn as a wrist band.^[21][22][23]
• Airbus is developing a battery-powered quadcopter to act as an urban air taxi, at first with a pilot but potentially autonomous in the future.^[24]  

 Flying prototype of the Parrot AR.Drone

 Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 take-off, Nevada, 2012

 

Several camera-drone projects have turned into high-profile commercial failures:

• Zano (drone) - a high-profile Kickstarter project to build a quadcopter-camera drone, Zano failed after delivering only a small fraction of their orders in a partially nonfunctional state.^[25][26][27]
• Lily Camera - a startup attempting to make a quadcopter-camera drone, sued by the San Francisco District Attorney after they closed down without fulfilling any of their pre-orders.^[28][29][30]

In July 2015, a video was posted on YouTube of an airborne quadcopter firing a pistol four times in a wooded area, sparking regulatory concerns.^[31][32]