A great many drones out there, whether homebuilt or store-bought, follow the same basic format. Four motors, some kind of controller, and a lithium-polymer battery supplying the juice to keep everything in the air. It’s a format that produces a remarkably capable air vehicle, suitable for everything from high-speed camera work to urban search and rescue.
With that said, the format does have its limitations. [Suryansh Sharma] has been working on alternative designs for fancy and interesting drones that are half quadcopter and half blimp, and he came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.
[Suryansh]’s talk took in a number of drone projects which he has been involved with. The first was the creatively-named BEAVIS, or Balloon Enabled Aerial Vehicle for IoT and Sensing. This was a project that aimed to tackle one of the greatest limitations of the common multirotor drone. Namely, as [Suryansh] so elegantly puts it, they “suck when it comes to staying in the air.” This is for a very simple reason—much like the helicopter, a multirotor drone must expend energy continuously to generate lift by spinning its propellers. Conventional multirotors don’t have wings that generate lift from forward motion, and any sort of gliding or similar behavior is basically impossible. Continual energy expenditure is the only thing keeping a multirotor aloft.
The point of BEAVIS was to fix this by combining drone tech with a simple lighter-than-air balloon. It’s an interesting combination, because a multirotor drone has excellent maneuverability and agility, but terrible endurance. A lighter-than-air balloon is quite the opposite, which has excellent endurance while suffering in all other respects. The BEAVIS concept outfits a small balloon with four motors in a split-cross configuration, which allows for planar translation as well as the ability to control yaw of the craft. With all four motors mounted horizontally in the same plane, it may seem like vertical control is not possible. However, by turning on two opposing props, it’s possible to create a low-pressure region beneath the craft which tends to push it downwards. Meanwhile, if you turn all four props on in the right directions, you create a high pressure region underneath the balloon which pushes the craft up. With the balloon, it has the benefit of being able to just hang in the air without continually burning through battery power. Endurance times of well over an hour were possible with this build, compared to maybe less than ten minutes for a comparable pure multirotor.
BEAVIS was eventually developed into Janus— described as a “morphing quadrotor blimp with balloon failure resilience.” The goal was to build a craft that was viable for deployment in the real world, and that could undertake mobile ecological sensing work. The main difference to the previous design was that it would no longer solely fly as a balloon with horizontally-mounted props. Instead, Janus would feature a mechanism to allow the rotors to be positioned in the vertical axis to allow for conventional multirotor flight. This was key to allowing the craft to fly both as a lighter-than-air craft, and to survive and keep flying in the event the balloon burst or was otherwise damaged. The build was eventually deployed in Kenya to aid in ecological data collection for conservation efforts.
[Suryansh] has been involved in other drone-related projects, too. Open Gimbal was a particularly interesting effort, involving the construction of a bench-testing rig for developing small multirotor drone craft. The 3-DoF platform offered unrestricted rotational freedom, allowing for a craft to be put through its paces in a controlled way without requiring a large open space for free flight. [Suryansh] also discusses his work with a company called Avy, which specializes in VTOL drones with a focus on emergency response roles. The company has deployed drones that use multirotor technology to launch vertically, while relying on fixed wing aerodynamic elements to extend range and improve efficiency for longer flight times. The drones feature a neat charging setup, wherein pogo pins on the fins pick up power from the metal launchpad to ensure that batteries are fully charged and the drone is ready to go at all times.
Ultimately, multirotor drones have taken on their basic form for good reason. With that said, as [Suryansh]’s talk explains, modifications to the form can have great utility when made to suit a particularly specific mission or application. If you’re developing a drone for a certain purpose, and you’re running into hard limitations, you might try thinking outside the box to make something more fitting for your goals.
