Design and Longitudinal Dynamics Decoupling Control of a Tilt-Rotor Aerial Vehicle With High Maneuverability and Efficiency
Haoze Li, Xiangming Zheng, Haoran He, Luwei Liao
Abstract
The widespread application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) brings a higher demand for their interaction capabilities, highlighting the improvements in UAVs’ maneuverability and efficiency. Most existing design schemes of fully-actuated aerial vehicles have disadvantages, such as thrust offset and limited attitude angles. This letter proposes a design and control scheme for a power-efficient Highly-Maneuverable Tilt-rotor (HMT) aerial vehicle. First, an aerial vehicle dynamics configuration composed of three 360-degree tiltable rotors around two parallel pitching axes is designed, bounding the rotor's thrust around the vertical state to reduce the horizontal force offset at large pitch angles and improve the power utilization efficiency. Second, to avoid the Euler angle singularity when the pitch angle is close to ±90 degrees, this letter builds a dynamics model to describe a virtual body mapping the actual body to a close-to-horizontal state. Third, to improve the maneuverability of the aerial vehicle, a longitudinal dynamics decoupling controller is designed to enable the independent control of the position and attitude of the aerial vehicle based on the virtual body concept. Flight tests show that the aerial vehicle can achieve highly-maneuverable omni-directional flight in ±90 degrees pitch angles, which proves the rationality and feasibility of the design and control scheme.