Drone Classification as per Build

Contributed by Amit Lal

Drones in general are known by several names such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Unmanned Aerial Systems, Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems and many more.

We will classify them as per their model type. Model type refers to the build type of the drone.

Drones primarily have three classifications:

1. Multirotors

2. Fixed Wings

3. Hybrid VTOL

Multirotors:

As the names suggest they have multiple rotors. But this is not what makes them unique. The best features that multirotors bring in is the ability of VTOL ( Vertical Taken Off and Landing) . This makes them easy for take off from restricted spaces and adds the ability of point hovering ( hovering on a particular stationary point). Multirotors are further classified on basis of their number of rotors.

Helicopter

Bicopter

Tricopter

Quadcopter

Hexacopter

Octocopter

Fixed Wing Drones

The name itself suggests that they have fixed wings. They are pretty much like the scale down models airplanes that we see or travel in. They derive their lift from a fixed wing and hence are called fixed wing drones.

They are basically of two types:

Delta wing Drones

Conventional Fixed wing Drone

Hybrid Drones

These drones combine both the capabilities of fixed wings and multirotors and are hence knows as hybrid drones.

They are of three types:

Fixed Rotor Hybrid Drones

Tiltrotor Hybrid Drones

Tailsitter Hybrid Drones