The Swedish company Jetson has introduced a manned multicopter capable of accelerating up to 102 kilometers per hour. The drone has lidars to help avoid collisions, and a parachute, and the power of the engines allows you to continue flying in case one of them breaks down. The company intends to start small-scale production in 2022 and sell the devices for 92 thousand dollars.
Among the usual unmanned drones, there is a large class of racing FPV drones that allow you to fly at high speed and perform impressive stunts. Most of them are independently assembled by enthusiasts, but serial devices have already begun to appear, including from well-known drone manufacturers . With multicopters that transport people, the situation is different — there are already many models designed for flights of one or more people, but almost always these are air taxis flying on autopilot to a given point, for example, EHang has such a drone.
Manned drone projects are either single prototypes so far from amateur engineers, or projects from companies ( 1, 2 ) that still fly without people. Also in 2018, Kitty Hawk introduced a single-seat manned drone, but she was going to sell it only to legal entities, and two years later she closed the project.
Jetson company presented a single-seat Jetson ONE racing drone, which anyone can buy, and demonstrated its tests. The drone is made in the form of a cabin with four shoulders. Two electric motors with large open screws are installed at the end of each arm. The weight of the drone is 86 kilograms, and the maximum weight of the pilot is 95 kilograms.
The drone is controlled manually using a joystick and a traction control lever. At the same time, he also has a terrain and obstacle tracking system that scans the space around with lidars. In addition, the drone has other ways to ensure safety: triple redundancy of the on-board computer and the ability to fly without one propeller, as well as an emergency ballistic parachute that is automatically ejected in the event of an uncontrolled fall.
The manufacturer claims that the drone is capable of accelerating up to 102 kilometers per hour, and this is a software limitation, and technically its capabilities are higher. On a single charge, Jetson ONE is capable of flying for 20 minutes. The cost of the drone is 92 thousand dollars. The company plans to deliver the first 12 devices in 2022.
Last year, a subsidiary of Toyota demonstrated the first flight of its single-seat drone. She also plans to implement it in serial form, but judging by the wording on her website, this drone cannot be bought for personal use.
Grigory Kopiev