Corvus.

Most quadcopters are built for fifteen-minute missions. They take off, they do their job, they come home. The result is a fleet of machines that are remarkably good at sprinting and remarkably bad at the kind of slow, patient work that conservation, ecological survey, and long-baseline cinematography actually require.

Corvus is the answer to a simpler question: what does a quadcopter look like if you optimise for endurance and acoustic signature instead of agility?

The answer turns out to be: a slow-spinning, large-diameter rotor pair on a stiff bamboo spine, with the structure tuned to be quiet under the harmonics that propellers actually produce. Twice the flight time of a conventional 250-class drone, at roughly a third of the noise.

The central beam is a laminated billet of moso bamboo, machined from a single piece of stock. Bamboo's natural fibre alignment runs the length of the beam — the same direction as the bending stress under load — which is half of why the structure is so quiet. The other half is in the joints.

Where most folding drones use aluminium hinges and accept the resulting chatter, Corvus uses a walnut-and-bio-resin knuckle that is dimensionally stable, vibration-damping, and field-replaceable in under five minutes. There are three of them on the airframe, and they are the only parts you will ever need to service.

Acoustic signature

Measured at 30m hover, Corvus produces approximately 48 dBA in still air — roughly the volume of a quiet conversation. Ambient bird-call frequencies in temperate forest sit between 2–8 kHz; the rotor fundamentals on Corvus sit at 142 Hz and 268 Hz, well below the band where wildlife react.

Corvus was designed for slow work. The use cases that informed it:

• conservation Wildlife survey, anti-poaching patrols, nest monitoring at acoustic distance.
• survey Long-baseline aerial mapping, photogrammetry, archaeological reconnaissance.
• cinematography Documentary work where a quiet platform is the point.
• research Atmospheric sampling, citizen-science deployments, education.

We do not recommend Corvus for racing, freestyle, or anything that requires aggressive cornering. There are better drones for those jobs, and we are happy to point you at them.

Prototype II is currently in flight testing across two conservation-partner sites. We expect to open a small early-customer program in the second half of MMXXVI, with general availability tracking the season after.

If you are working on a project where a quiet, long-endurance drone would change what is possible, write to the workshop. We are allocating early units by use case rather than queue order.

Write to the workshop →