Darner

Which way a wingtip propeller spins can cut a wing's drag. Every wing leaves a swirl of air at each tip, and that swirl is wasted energy. Put the propeller at the tip and spin it against the swirl, and part of that energy comes back. In TU Delft wind tunnel tests this cut drag by about 15% compared with a propeller mounted further in. Small electric motors make tip mounting practical. NASA moved the X-57's cruise motors to the wingtips for exactly this reason.

Project Update: the rudders now use a TPU hinge printed in place with the surface. It's flexible, it can't come loose, and it adds zero hardware. It's working really well so far.

Project Update: 12S1P battery pack for the pods, built from 12 Molicel P50B 21700 cells. That's 5Ah at 43.2V nominal (about 216Wh) and 50.4V fully charged, with a 60A peak discharge.

Project Update: three tail fins off the printer and on the table today. Yellow skins, black root fittings. Next step is fitting them to the airframe.

Project Update. Motor and prop on the bench rig.

Project Update. X70 turbine on our load cell. 69.8 N of thrust at 195,000 rpm.

Project Update. Landing fin v1 and v2 side by side. v2 gets a larger control surface, and the servo is now built into the fin. Fewer parts hanging outside means a cleaner fin and more control authority from the same footprint.

When four drones share a cable-hung load, the box can stay on path while some cables go slack and others overload. AFD-CAMLs (TU Delft) picks a feasible force split during planning, then nudges each drone from onboard tension estimates so the load stays shared. Real flights with four UAVs cut tension-tracking RMSE from 3.51 N to 2.09 N and still held agile figure-eight tracking. arxiv.org/abs/2610.01185

Unknown rooms do not need a pre-built map. LiDARFlow (ENAC): live LiDAR panels feed a lightweight guidance field so a MAV stays collision-free in clutter with only onboard sensing. Indoor flights finished waypoint and directional tasks in real time. arxiv.org/abs/2610.01573

Landing-pad peak rate is not vertiport capacity. UC Berkeley: takeoff/landing plus charging typically leave a single-TLOF site near half theoretical max when short queues must hold with high confidence. Extra pads and steadier turnarounds recover it. arxiv.org/abs/2609.37288