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.
Combining a multirotor design with a balloon for additional lift proved useful for certain applications. Despite the motors all being mounted in the horizontal plane, vertical translation is possible by firing the right combination of motors, due to convenient aerodynamic effects. Credit: slides
[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.
