Driving and tilt‐hovering – An agile and manoeuvrable aerial vehicle with tiltable rotors

Abstract

Driving and tilt‐hovering help unmanned aerial vehicles extend their time of operation and the visible range of the equipped sensors. Standard quadrotors are underactuated, whose translational and rotational motions are strongly coupled. As a result, it is impossible to maintain the attitude invariably while changing position. Meanwhile, larger flying speed results in greater air resistance, which is also not desirable. A novel aerial platform with tiltable rotors is proposed. Compared with standard quadrotors, the aerial vehicle has three special capabilities: vector‐flying, tilt‐hovering, and driving. The platform consists of two tilting‐axes to change the direction of thrusts with respect to the aircraft body. To guarantee flexible manoeuvres, a geometric tracking control scheme that adapts on the fly to the thrust vectoring is exploited. Manoeuvrability of the proposed vehicle in different manoeuvres is demonstrated, such as flight with vectoring thrust that can reduce the flight resistance, tilt‐hovering expanding the reachable set of the equipped sensors. The prototype equipped with an electromechanical controller is constructed, and several associated preliminary experiments are performed. The feasibility of the mechanical design and the geometric control strategy are demonstrated.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Search and Rescue: A Survey

“…The result of CFD further proves the effectiveness and integrity of the blade. To improve the mobility of multirotor UAVs, the paper [27] introduced tiltable rotors into quadrotor design, developing three types of new movements for quadrotors such as vectorflying, tilting, hovering, and driving. This leads to better mobility in operating SAR tasks, and more adaptive movement could be performed in complex environments.…”

Adaptive integral backstepping control of a reconfigurable quadrotor with variable parameters’ estimation

“…The researchers in this paper have only interested in the dynamic characteristics of the proposed structure. Li et al 21 have proposed a tiltable rotors drone, which can change the direction of thrusts forces by varying the direction of its propellers. However, the proposed structure has not been exploited in specific tasks.…”

“…In order to ensure the Lyapunov stability and verify condition (21), the adaptive controller can be expressed by equation (11).…”

Modeling and Control of Reconfigurable Quadrotors Based on Model Reference Adaptive Control

“…The systematic dynamics model of the chain was given and model predictive control laws are presented, experimental tests show that the chain can cross the narrow windows. An integrated vehicle was proposed in the reference [16], so called integrated means that it can move on the ground and can fly in the air. The detailed dynamical model and control allocation was presented, experimental tests validate the reasonability.…”