It may sound bizarre, but it was bound to happen. Quadcopters, after they conquered flying in air, are now also equally capable of flying below water. Of course, submarine vehicles need a different build to keep the water from entering the system. Therefore, submarine quadcopters will always be sturdier and more expensive than their airborne counterparts will. You can witness the Deepflight Dragon – a beautiful quadcopter – on Lake Tahoe, California.
Graham Hawkes, submarine designer, was initially interested in aviation, but was disappointed as he was born too late for building airplanes in his backyard. Therefore, he concentrated his design expertise towards building Deepflight Dragon. Presently, the design is still in preliminary testing stage and the stabilization software is yet unfinished. Kip Laws, chief scientist of Deepflight, is delighted with the progress after the first test of the vehicle.
With its four vertical thrusters, Deepflight Dragon looks more like a two-seater Formula One car without wheels. You could easily pass it off as a flying car when on a helipad. Graham has applied aircraft technology to build the drone of the deep. It is a simple, stable vehicle able to move around freely and hovering when the driver wants it to – for whom it is a piece of cake to drive.
Graham first stumbled on the idea for the Dragon when he found people trying to build a full-sized quadcopter capable of carrying a man and flying like a drone. His calculations told him there would never be enough energy and endurance in a drone to carry the weight of a man and batteries while flying. However, if taken underwater, the buoyant force of water will help carry the weight – water is a fluid 850 times denser than air.
That made Deepflight Dragon a two-person underwater drone. One of the biggest advantages of flying underwater is the buoyancy provided by water. Deepflight Dragon has positive buoyancy, which means it naturally floats. Therefore, to submerge, it only has to pull itself downwards to the equivalent of five percent of its weight. This also allows Deepflight Dragon to have an all-day endurance with only a 15 KWHr battery pack.
The back cockpit of the drone has only two controls. The first is a lever on the left and the other is a joystick on the right. The lever is for engaging upward or downward vertical thrust, with the joystick making the sub move forward or backward, while also allowing it to turn left or right.
Although the controls look simple, they are somewhat different from those on an airborne copter, which simply tilts forward to go forward. As the Dragon has to pull downwards to get itself underwater, tilting the joystick forward actually makes it move backwards. Additionally, when the drone is moving forward, its rear end will go up, hindering vision.
All this makes it necessary to have a stabilization system to keep the sub on a level plane – with an extra set of thrusters mounted under the rear wing. Being in an X/Y orientation, these extra thrusters move the sub and allow it to make turns. That leaves the main four thrusters to control the depth of the sub and to level it.
