Contributed by Amit Lal
Drones in general are known by several names such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Unmanned Aerial Systems, Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems and many more.
We will classify them as per their model type. Model type refers to the build type of the drone.
Drones primarily have three classifications:
Multirotors
Fixed Wings
Hybrid VTOL
Multirotors:
As the names suggest they have multiple rotors. But this is not what makes them unique. The best features that multirotors bring in is the ability of VTOL ( Vertical Taken Off and Landing) . This makes them easy for take off from restricted spaces and adds the ability of point hovering ( hovering on a particular stationary point). Multirotors are further classified on basis of their number of rotors.
Helicopter
Bicopter
Tricopter
Quadcopter
Hexacopter
Octocopter
Fixed Wing Drones
The name itself suggests that they have fixed wings. They are pretty much like the scale down models airplanes that we see or travel in. They derive their lift from a fixed wing and hence are called fixed wing drones.
They are basically of two types:
Delta wing Drones
Conventional Fixed wing Drone
Hybrid Drones
These drones combine both the capabilities of fixed wings and multirotors and are hence knows as hybrid drones.
They are of three types:
Fixed Rotor Hybrid Drones
Tiltrotor Hybrid Drones
Tailsitter Hybrid Drones
Comments