Cleo Dronut VX

Cleo's Dronut X1, is designed to navigate and conduct reconnaissance in GPS restricted areas. The ducted bi-rotor design means that there are no exterior propellers, making navigating through tight spaces easier while mitigating the risk of damage to wires, sensitive equipment, or the drone itself. https://cleorobotics.com/

Initially the Cleo Dronut appealed to my desire to have a, flubber style, robot assistant that floats around my house, cooking meals and cleaning up after me, but what really got me interested was the steering mechanism. As opposed to a traditional quadcopter style drone, which spins its' propellers at different speeds and directions to employ pitch, yaw, and roll, the Cleo Dronut uses a novel thrust vectoring system. Four "blades" (as far as i can tell. although their patent shows only three) stored at the side of the duct are mechanically shifted to obstruct the air flow coming from the two propellers housed at the center of the drone, thus channeling the air flow in a certain direction.

As the Cleo Dronut is very new and there is little information regarding its' function and hardware, I had to spend a lot of time reverse engineering, and researching different components. For the aesthetic design I ended up going with a design that felt rugged, but professional enough to not stand out in an office environment. Because the drone is so small it was important for me that the design not become 'toy like', so the details and shapes I used were kept simple and based around the exterior functions of the drone. In a similar vane I went through several iterations of the camera and lidar 'face' to avoid giving the drone too much of a personality. I did however add a grey rubberized material to the front of the camera housing, which I felt made the entire design feel more directional and maybe a bit more imposing. The outer surface of the drone is rubberized and patterned to provide better horizontal grip when grabbing the drone from the air. The embossed pattern is inspired by urban camo and topographic maps which I felt enforced a feeling of ruggedness while eluding to its' main lidar payload.