Emerald – a 16-rotor multicopter for stereo imaging

What is it about?

This paper presents a novel 16-rotor multi-copter design named Emerald. The aircraft implements innovations resulting in benefits over other contemporary multi-copters. The novel features are as follows. The rotors are mounted under the fuselage and pusher propellers are used. This approach increases flight times of multi-copters by several percent as shown in (Zabunov and Mardirossian, 2018). Another novelty is the positioning of 16 rotors in an optimal geometric coverage. The latter design method ensures minimal size and weight of the fuselage. Further, the 16 rotors’ optimal coverage design is arranged into geometrical 2D shape of a rhombus in the horizontal plane. At the vertices of the longer diagonal of the rhombus two identical cameras are mounted with servo systems forming a stereo observation payload. The design guarantees large parallax between the two camera views thus providing better spatial resolution of the acquired stereo images. Finally, the novel model is applicable to microdrones weighing 250 g or less, but also to very large machines capable of carrying significant payloads of very high resolution cameras operating in a vast number of light wavelengths. The design is applicable to stereo thermal camera payloads as well.

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