Commercial drones have been around for decades. The drones have become a significant market with dozens of companies in the race for making drones for countless applications, and this includes the tech leaders like Amazon and Facebook. The gadgets have now become so popular that they have their separate wing at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
The drone technology has evolved to include so many capabilities, but up until now, the drones had the restriction of always flying parallel to the ground, but Voliro Hexacopter concept drone is about to change that. The six props of the prototype hexacopter can tilt 360 degrees offering the drone 12 degrees of freedom in the air.
Twelve degrees of freedom? Kind of hard to imagine, no? The Voliro was designed and built in only nine months, and the drone can hover sideways, upside down, diagonally, or any other way that you can imagine. The team behind the Voliro consisted of 11 students from ETH Zurich, imparting it limitless flying capabilities. The team, however, is focusing on its ability to hug walls, which can be very useful in infrastructure inspection jobs.
It has already mind numbing to imagine a craft moving in so many directions, think about how you would manage to fly that thing. It is complicated enough with a quadcopter already, so it only gets only worse with more propellers. The flight control software will be doing most of this job for you, adjusting power to the propellers automatically at all times.
Watch the Voliro fly in the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FJn_t-YCwM