The concept of angular momentum is one of the examples of non-Intuitive physics. With out sufficient mathematical knowledge and imagination power, its hard to understand gyroscopic precisions. One of the flying machine which uses this concept of angular momentum and torque is helicopter. Its a complex machine to understand. Simply attaching a rotor to a helicopter like body will not work. Angular momentum has to be compensated. Last week I bought picooz, a miniature helicopter. Its design is wonderful, it has a tiny rotor with a tiny motor in the tail to produce torque to avoid spinning. Controlling this toy, (I don't want to say its toy, its a flying machine), is not so easy. First one has to understand why it is spinning. There are two rotors spinning, so we can see nice addition of angular momentum, and the resultant. Sometimes I could see superpositions of different movements, resulting something like lissajous figures.
In the beginning it will start spinning wildly, because of the angular momentum produced by the main rotor. Then by adjusting the tail rotor rpm we can reduce the spinning and slowly it started circling. By fine tuning the rotor rpm we can increase or decrease the radius of the circle. Practically it is possible to make the radius infinity(thats the physicist way of saying that its going in straight line). Anyway its lot of fun with lot of physics.
In this video here I try to bring the helicopter in the field of view, so I made it spinning so that it stays at a place. Then I apply torque to avoid spinning then its started circling,.I try to increase the radius of the circle, but it crashed in to the wall :( . No casualties ..:)
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