Witold Mielniczek does amazing things with quadcopters. After a successful Kickstarter funding campaign in 2013 for B the flying car Mielniczek is back with another project. B-Unstoppable is billed as the world’s first Tank Quadcopter hybrid.
After filing a patent application in June 2013 Mielniczek continued development of a quadcopter body that could also accommodate motors and treads to give driving functionality to his vehicle. The tank design allows for 360 degree position viewing from the onboard camera where the user can then decide if a ground or air approach is best for the next obstacle.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2017062404/b-unstoppable
The 900 milliamp hour battery has been testing at nine minutes of flying or a range of twelve to eighteen minutes of driving for the B’s 84 gram frame. First person view footage on the campaign video shows a 25 milliwatt 5.8 gigahertz transmitter and looks amazing as the camera first shows driving footage and then transitions to flying.
Hybrid drone tank use looks like it will be useful in a huge range of applications. The biggest draw for me would be energy usage, where ground use only needs around forty percent of the energy required for flying. The campaign page also shows applications where filming from a ledge, showing different camera perspectives, and stealthy approaches to wildlife photography benefit from driving and flying. Watching the drone take a ride down a playground slide and then fly out of the picture is definitely cool stuff.
Units are expected to ship worldwide in October 2015. Mielniczek has plans for more drone hybrid craft on his mind, and would like to find a way to give the B-Unstoppable to maneuver and float on water.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2017062404/b-unstoppable