Building a Flying Drone With a Single Propeller

Technically all that you need to make a drone fly is a single motor and single propeller, but realistically it becomes basically impossible to fly it at that …. Building a Flying Drone With a Single Propeller. In the case of helicopters you therefore need a second rotor somewhere to provide counterbalance to the first and to be able to steer.

There are of course several ways to make a drone fly with a single helicopter, but the compromise usually is to use very large propellers, as well as other mechanisms that make for a very large drone. This wasn’t good enough for [Joshua Bird] who wanted to have a very small, single propeller drone. Key to making it work is not only a very high RPM, but also a hinged propeller hub that manipulates the angle of the blades in such a way that both pitch and roll can be controlled if you react quickly enough.

This turned out to be impossible using standard motor ESCs that do not directly measure the motor’s speed and position but rely on back EMF. In the final prototype of the drone such details had to be measured directly, with super-fast adjustments to the motor’s speed only possible with custom controller code and a lot of trial and error. Even then the drone would often lose track of its position and crash once more.