As part of our Future Concepts, we are constantly on the lookout for new or not yet widespread motion and drive concepts. With SmartInversion, our developers have succeeded in creating an ultra-light flying object that moves by folding itself over. The endless, rhythmically pulsating and folding movement is called inversion and gives the model its name.
The shape of the flying object is derived from the invertible cube by Paul Schatz. He cut a cube into two star-shaped bodies at the corners and a cuboid belt in the middle. The belt is a six-jointed ring that breaks out of the two corner bodies, can be continually inverted and thus takes on different shapes.
The flying cuboid belt consists of six identical prisms filled with helium. Each prism is made up of six carbon fiber rods, which form the clamping frame for the outer membrane. A total of 2130 liters of helium provide the necessary buoyancy for the flying object, which weighs only 2334 grams. Three servo motors, which are coordinated by an on-board unit, serve as the drive. Depending on the phase, two of the motors run forward, while the third coasts along, moving in the opposite direction.
The intelligent combination of extremely lightweight construction, electric drives and control technology makes continuous inversion in the air possible. During the flight, software continuously collects data such as battery charge or power consumption and checks it in real time. For us as a company, the principle of permanent diagnostics is also a guarantee of process reliability in automation technology.
Schatz discovered with the cube that the transmission theory based on rotation (rotational movement) and translation (linear movement) could be extended by one element: inversion. Paul Schatz's ideas are already being used in industry, for example in internal mixers or for aerating and circulating stagnant water.