Final Product: HE.RO
Target Market
Target consumers will be any everyday drone owner/ hobbyist who wishes to find an affordable method to increase the flight time of their everyday drone. Target consumers can also be event organisers as HE.RO can be used to record party events or events in convention halls and HE.RO is also aesthetically pleasing with party balloons suspended above the gyroframe.
Functions
HE.RO is a helium attachment for everday drones, made with 6 40-inch O-shape balloons. From our calculations, we need to use a volume of helium, matching approximately 6 40-inch O-shape balloons, in order to achieve slight negative or near neutral buoyancy. This state of buoyancy is favoured over positive buoyancy, as with positive buoyancy, the drone with HE.RO attachment will keep ascending infinitely, making it more difficult to control. Hence, with slight negative buoyancy, whereby the upthrust from the helium helps to counter some of the weight, upthrust required from the drone for it to hover is reduced, hence rotors spin slower and battery usage is slower, making the drone more energy efficient.
HE.RO is made with a gyroframe with two-axis of rotation allows the drone to move independently of the helium attachment. Since the drone with helium attachment can now tilt without tilting the entire helium balloon attachment, no moment will be created. Therefore, allowing drone with the helium attachment to move more stably in all 4 directions.
Materials
Gyroframe made from soft and light-weighted material such as stryofoam.
O-shape balloons will be manufactured from big mylar sheets.
Ergonomics/ overall sizes
The gyroframe will be the correct size to allow the rotors of your everyday drone to fit within the most inner frame of the gyroframe.
In this case, our final product prototype is designed to allow the fitting of common everyday drones of a wide size range of 28cm max.
The overall size of the gyroframe is approximately :
outer ring-60.5cm x 60.5cm
middle ring-47cm x 47cm
inner ring-37cm x 37cm
Thickness of walls of each ring is approximately 5cm for a more strong and rigid gyroframe structure.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance experiments are carried out, with 2 different models of everyday drones interchanged, to ensure that HE.RO fulfills its main objective of making everyday drones more power saving and hence increasing their flight time.
As seen from the results, HE.RO allows a 33% to 67% increase in hovering time. Hence, we can confirm that HE.RO does help to increase flight time of our everyday drone.
Cost
Build cost of HE.RO is affordable at $27 when the helium balloons are made from big mylar sheets.
Safety
Gyroframe made of soft light-weighted material such as foam, which also acts as an exterior protective frame around the rotors to reduce damage during crashes.