the.com/quadcopter
Four motors arguing in real time so you don't have to fly it yourself.
means An aircraft lifted and steered by four fixed rotors, whose speeds are individually adjusted to climb, tilt, and turn.
from Built from 'quad-' (Latin quattuor, four) plus '-copter,' the suffix sliced off 'helicopter' itself a 19th-century French coinage ('hélicoptère') from Greek 'helix' (spiral) and 'pteron' (wing). That same suffix later got bolted onto all sorts of flying things — gyrocopter, multicopter — but 'quadcopter' only really took off (so to speak) once small electronics in the 2000s made four cheap motors easier to control than one complicated rotor head.
- stability trick
- flight controller corrects itself hundreds of times per second
- motor math
- diagonal rotors spin opposite ways to cancel torque
- no tail rotor
- skips the helicopter's single point of failure entirely
- military roots
- became a battlefield tool before becoming a wedding photographer