Griffin

Griffin is a UGAV prototype: a hybrid platform combining ground mobility with short-duration aerial capability. It drives, and where the ground runs out, it flies, briefly.

That word briefly is the whole design problem. A machine built only to fly can be light and open. A machine built only to drive can be heavy and closed. One that does both has to carry its running gear into the air with it, which means every part either earns its place twice or is dead weight under the rotors.

Two answers to the same problem

There were several versions. Two are shown here, and they resolve that constraint in different hardware.

The first is built on cage wheels: four spherical wire cages on outriggers, each with a rotor inside it. The cage is the wheel and the rotor guard at once. It rolls on the ground and shrouds the blade in the air, so the heaviest thing on the vehicle does two jobs instead of one.

The second uses tracks and ducted rotors. Two large track pods sit either side of a narrow spine with four ducted rotors carried between them. On the ground it reads as a tracked vehicle, and the shots put it on loose rock and through shallow water where that reads. In the air, the rotors spin up inside the same envelope the tracks wrap around.

Rendering it

Built and rendered in Blender.

Concept work at this stage is asking one question: does this read as a single machine, or as a drone bolted to a tank? That is a question about silhouette, so the frames are chosen to make the proportions legible rather than to flatter them: a cave mouth for scale against rock, a streambed for the track line, an interior with the ceiling close overhead.

The indoor hover is the frame that has to work. Airborne in a confined room with the tracks hanging below and the rotors blurred, it is the one image where both halves of hybrid are true at the same time.