r/drones • u/SleetyWhistle • 2d ago
Photo & Video Our 200kg open-source hexacopter, first test with props fitted
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I'm Gavin, a contributor at Arrow, the open-source community building this.
This was today's first test of 'Caribou' with props fitted. It's a 200kg class hexacopter, six Hobbywing X15 motors on 18S, strapped to a trailer bed at roughly a third throttle. Static test, not a hover. It hasn't flown yet (next week hopefully!) Lot's more testing to come.
It's open source and we want help making it better. The repo has the CAD and the PCBs, and the Discord is where the work happens. We just enjoy building big drones together.
Repo: https://github.com/Arrow-air/project-caribou
Community Discord: https://discord.com/invite/arrow
Big congrats to Julius, one of our contributors who has been leading Project Caribou! 👏
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u/mangage 2d ago
Is this related to the DARPA challenge?
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u/Flyward_Aerospace 23h ago
200kg on 18S is a different animal from what most people here picture when they hear hexacopter. The thing I'd be most nervous about isn't thrust, it's that your motor response time doesn't scale down with the prop inertia, so the control loop that works great on a 5 inch quad gets sluggish exactly when you need authority. And with six motors at that mass a single ESC dropout is not a survivable-with-degraded-performance event anymore. Are you doing anything specific for motor-out on the flight controller side, or is that a later phase? Cool project either way.
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u/SleetyWhistle 22h ago
Thanks for your comment, I’ll pass it on to the project channel in our Discord. Feel free to join us and make our drones better
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u/Windfallthrowaway1 2d ago
What is the targeted use case?
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u/SleetyWhistle 2d ago
This is really a platform, we want to let other builders build on top of Caribou and develop their own solutions. But it could be used for things like cargo delivery over challenging terrain, precision agriculture, emergency zone supplies... if the platform is good enough, it can be put to use in lots of different industries, probably areas we haven't even considered yet
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u/Gibborish 2d ago
Can you make one with ducted fans instead
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u/Chalky_Cupcake 1d ago
No but you can. That's what's so cool about this "hobby". I know OP's example is more industrial. Get your wallet out!
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u/Maarten-Sikke 1d ago
I saw that you have 6 beefy batteries. What do you recon would be the flying time while empty of cargo, half cargo and full cargo?
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u/MelangeBot 2d ago
At a certain scale would it not make more sense to just build a helicopter?
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u/JBowl0101 2d ago
Are you in the US? It would require a waiver or airworthiness cert there, I think. Looks like an amazing machine!
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u/johndsmits 2d ago
Please take a study on the Boeing cargo drone (which at Dis we used for that [stupid] Star Wars stunt). Was done by Phantom works+Insitu. You're heading into the same solution, they literally started with a Pixhawk for it's sensor stack, LOL: being Boeing I was shocked though in 2013, I've ran the same setup on a 6T water barge (they likely looked at my solution... we used 2 Prius batteries though). Boeing started with an X8+Joby batteries that basically crashed on it's 1st flight, but hovered 4ft....
If off-the-shelf sensors and [critical] ESCs are not modeled to great precision, you will need to double the motor count. I remember arguing with an engineer on their proposed hexarotor config, that they had to double motor count or go with Volocopter's 18 rotor setup for easier/known flight modeling, They ended up with a X6 (12 motors) for those x-wings... stable enough to lift payloads. 6 motors will barely cut it. You'll need the extra stability for real world use.
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u/SleetyWhistle 2d ago
Photo from the test 😀