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by JshWright 4142 days ago
A quadrotor doesn't have any sort of 'redundancy'. If you lose a rotor, you've lost control, and will be hitting the ground in pretty short order. I see multiple rotors as a disadvantage... more things to go wrong.
3 comments

That depends heavily on your control system and how well you've tested it. In theory, a control system for a quadcopter that has independently controllable rotors could keep itself stable if one goes out. In practice, any control path you haven't tested probably won't work.
The biggest issue I see is dealing with the unbalanced torque... You could probably manage a 'controlled crash', but that's about it.
It depends on your design. You can build it with separate engines and manage to land safely on two diagonally opposite engines.
I'm not sure that's feasible. I've been flying multi-rotors for quit some time and if you lose a motor on a quad it's nearly instantaneously on a collision course with the ground. Y-6 or Hexacopter would be more feasible from a redundancy standpoint.
Quadroter no, but multirotor yes. DJI's S900 and S1000 are designed such that two props can fail and it stays in the air.