Dropship with rover

The 'dropship' quadcopter and mockup rover used for testing ESA's latest StarTiger project, Dropter. The dropship steers itself to lower a rover gently onto a safe patch of the rocky martian surface. Starting from scratch for the eight-month project, the Dropter team was challenged to produce vision-based navigation and hazard detection and avoidance for the dropship. It has to identify a safe landing site and height before winching down its passenger rover on a set of cables. Flying to a maximum height of 17 m, the dropship comes gently down to 10 m above the ground, where it begins lowering the rover on a 5 m-long bridle, coming lower until the rover touches down. Then it returns to a safe altitude.

The test platform is about 1 m by 1 m in size, with 41 cm diameter rotors. Its total lift-off mass is about 16.8 kg, with the dropship weighing 13.2 kg and the rover 3.6 kg. Maximum flight time is limited to about 15 minutes due to battery capacity.