Tacocopter Basics

The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a thousand bucks. Amazon Prime is cool, and I can’t wait for self-driving delivery cars – but there’s a reason they call a beeline a beeline. Flying autonomous deliverybots are coming.  Fast.

Lest you doubt the logistics, the Hong Kong based hobbyshop of wonderment, Hobbyking, recently sponsored a contest called “Beerlift 2012”. While the contestants mostly used water as a standin for the bubbly, the winner, Romanian pilot Muresan Alexandru Camil, lifted over a hundred pounds of liquid – meaning that deliveries of entire beer kegs are not out of the question.  While his massive octocopter looks like quite an endeavor, American David Ditch lifted a respectable 50 lbs with a 2-foot-square quadcopter – enough for quite a few Taco Bell Doritos Locos to your door.  279 of them, if you’re counting.

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