The following month, a drone’s motor shut off as it switched from an upward flight path to flying straight ahead. Two safety features — one that’s supposed to land the drone in this type of situation and another that stabilizes the drone — both failed. As a result, the drone flipped upside down and dropped from 160 feet in the air, leading to a brush fire that stretched across 25 acres. It was later put out by the local fire department.

  • furryanarchy [comrade/them,they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Yes, but can be kinda worked around via gyrocopter designs. They usually have a simpler cyclic where the whole rotor is tilted, (so it's not actually a cyclic) and also typically have a tail that can have control surfaces. There are also designs like the Volocity where they just have a fuckton of smaller propellers, so one or two failing is proportionally a much smaller loss of thrust and control.

    Amazon isn't even trying anything, they are just doing what works on a small scale bigger and ignoring the problems being bigger causes.