Why It's So Hard to Attach a Parachute to a Drone?

Drones are not immune to the whole “What goes up must come down” thing, and their descent is not always planned. If a drone falls out of the sky, the plummeting load can weigh up to a dozen pounds and be accompanied by four spinning rotors ready to rip into, or lop off, anything that gets in their way. Firefly Technology first saw this problem when working in the industry, so Firefly, and their team, set out to fix it.

Since drones have four rotors, if one of them fails the imbalance sends the machine into a high rpm tumble. If the drone just popped out a parachute like the paratrooper toys you used to throw out the window as a kid, it would almost immediately be sucked into one of the still spinning rotors, providing no protection at all, and adding a tangled mess of rope and fabric to the crash site.

The team at Flyfire looked into other solutions, but the parachute seemed too good to pass up. If they could make it work, it’d be cheap to make, and effective. They just had to figure out a way to keep it away from the drone’s rotors. So, they decided to use a parachute, but have it release outside the draw of the rotors, “By using the control algorithm of Flyfire and inserting the parachute into it, we can stretch out from the fuselage and spray the parachute,”. While the parachute would be attached to the drone, it could be far enough from its moving parts to avoid failure: “It protects the parachutes lines and keeps the attachment point of the parachute outside of the roll radius.

While this concept makes sense, turning it into reality is a greater challenge. In order to avoid the rolling radius, the jet power must extend at an unusually fast speed. No material on the market can expand rapidly without tearing itself to pieces, so they made one.

They added onboard software to tell when the drone is entering a fatal roll and automatically launch the parachute, but they also gave control to the drone operator to launch the parachute if they saw the drone headed for trouble, like a building, electrical line, or tree.

Flyfire is currently working to get their OWL system into more applications, and working with the government to get waivers to allow OWL-equipped drones to fly where most drones aren’t allowed, like over groups of people, greatly increasing the usefulness of a drone.

After that, Flyfire has far greater plans for the material-science enigma they cracked. We'll just have to wait and see what they might be.