A New Form Factor for Drones: Vertical and Coaxial

This is presumably a totally uncritical lazy press release copy paste. For goodness sake, NASA's Ingenuity is not exactly a secret and that's only the latest in a very long line of commercial coaxial UAS.

Looks like a perfectly nice coax, but exactly the same tradeoffs of much higher mechanical complexity for a slightly smaller operating footprint which make them less appealing for most use cases. The article completely glosses over the fact that most traditional X/+ designs fold for transport.

But that's not a thing, and that's also not how that works. Multicopter rotor design is incredibly subtle.

(Two basic ideas for quad copters are that they need to slowly move horizontally for maximum efficiency, and that the vertical stagger between front and rear pair of rotors matters a lot.)

At the end of the day, this design is exactly what it is: Looks like a bottle which might be nice for someone. And the whole general layout thing boils down to flight time, in its weight class, with a given payload weight. There's not much more to it.

Is there a swashplate or something that I do not see, or is it as I assume, some kind of mechanism that allows cyclic to be controlled implicitly by motor speed? Edit: The patent apparently says they have a swashplate and cyclic control on the bottom rotor, so it's basically a model helicopter.

They can't patent the coaxial bit just by adding the 'on a UAV', so they patent their way of having the blades collapse.

We didn’t kill all the horses when we invented cars, as always the world just gets more complex. Quadcopters have an edge on this in terms of agility so many use cases will still be served by quadcopters

I don’t even want em to autoplay much less auto-full-screen

But if you really want to see proven drone designs, which are upgraded by war experience, just look at Ukraine drone units. That's it.