The contest held by the UAE has a clear winner

Feb 10, 2015 12:44 GMT  ·  By

If you like to learn about flying contraptions, you probably are very familiar with quadcopters and other little flying drones by now, whether they are for recreational purposes or for stuff like search and rescue.

Since there is always room for newer and better designs, the United Arab Emirates (UAE for short) host the Drones For Good Award every once in a while.

There, inventors from around the world come and reveal their latest ideas, each vying for the ultimate prize. The cash money this time was of one million dollars / €880,000.

The team that won the latest edition call themselves Flyability and come from Switzerland. Their idea won points for sheer practicality.

The crash-proof drone

Back in mid-January, a really amusing video emerged on the Internet, about a flying quadcopter drone that was capable of taking off on its own.

The drone was supposed to go straight up and hover until the user sent a command with the remote controller, but that's not what happened.

Instead, it mistook the nearby garage door for the “up” direction (for whatever reason) and crashed straight into it immediately after being turned on.

That glitch has obviously been addressed, but it highlights a risk that is always there: crashing. Flying machines could always crash. Whether due to human error, environmental conditions or just bad luck, it can happen.

That is why the Flyability team decided to make such crashes harmless. Or at least mostly harmless. Their approach was quite simple really, in concept if not in execution.

The Gimball drone (first revealed in 2013) mimics the ability of insects to crash into obstacles but keep flying afterwards.

They emulated that ability with the use of a carbon fiber cage surrounded by a second, rotating frame shaped like a sphere.

The practicalities

When the drone strikes a wall, ceiling or a supporting beam, the outer frame absorbs the impact while the inner mechanism, the drone itself, is unscathed.

This essentially makes proximity sensors and other obstacle avoidance methods unnecessary, which can significantly reduce its price without decreasing its usefulness in search and rescue missions, or disaster area scouting, research, etc.

Flyability didn't design the Gimball with any single one of those scenarios specifically in mind, but the design principles can be easily enough applied to all of them, as well as other flying machines in the future, so the team could be said to have revolutionized the sector in their own way.

The Gimball (4 Images)

The Gimball
Gimball flies aroundThe drone takes off
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