Testing of Quadcopter System

We discovered that a system with only one motor would cause rapid rotation due to the moments caused by the DC motor. We had seen this in our tests when the body was spinning to oppose the moment created on the rotor. This is due to Newton’s third law of motion which states every force applied has an equal and opposite reaction force of the same type to oppose it.

We attached a parachute to the prototype so that when the air flow went upwards, the air caught on the bottom side of the parachute and created momentum upwards. As the momentum increases upwards the velocity also increases upwards and therefore creating a greater resultant force upwards.

We had a team meeting and decided that having an active system was too complicated and made the executive decision to switch to a passive system to prevent the entanglement issues due to the blades of the motor.