The Tri Rotor Drone: Why Has It Been Overlooked?

Author: Jenny List / Source: Hackaday

If you are a watcher of the world of drones, or multirotors, you may have a fixed idea of what one of these aircraft looks like in your mind. There will be a central pod containing batteries and avionics, with a set of arms radiating from it, each of which will have a motor and a propeller on its end.

You are almost certainly picturing a four-rotor design, such as the extremely popular DJI Phantom series of craft.

Of course, four-rotor designs are just one of many possible configurations of a multirotor. You will commonly see octocopters, but sometimes we’ve brought you craft that really put the “multi” in “multirotor”. If the computer can physically control a given even number of motors, within reason, it can be flown.

There is one type of multirotor you don’t see very often though, the trirotor. Three propellers on a drone is a rare sight, and it’s something we find surprising because it’s a configuration that can have some surprising benefits. To think about why, it’s worth taking a look at some of the characteristics of a three-rotor machine’s flight.

If you think for a moment about a typical small helicopter, it will have a tail rotor. The tail rotor is there to provide a sideways force to counteract the natural tendency for the fuselage to spin in reaction to the rotation of the main rotor. With a twin-rotor helicopter such as the famous Chinook military aircraft, the tail rotor is superfluous because the tendency to rotate imparted by the front rotor is counteracted by an equal but opposite force from the contra-rotating rear rotor. If you take the counteracting forces in a Chinook as analogous to those on a multirotor, you…

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