A Flexibly Assembled and Maneuverable Reconfigurable Modular Multirotor Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

This article introduces a novel modular reconfigurable multirotor aerial vehicle that can flexibly configure the amount and position of rotors. According to different actual task requirements, such aerial vehicles can be flexibly assembled into bicopters, tricopters, quadcopters, and omnidirectional aerial vehicles. These multirotor aerial vehicles can independently control their position and attitude and track arbitrary trajectories in a 3-D space. Such maneuverability owes to a double-gimbal thrust module (DGTM), which can independently regulate the direction and magnitude of propeller thrust. The reconfigurable multirotor aerial vehicle’s dynamic model is established based on the analysis of the rotor distribution’s vector thrust and topological structure. Then, a hierarchical cooperative control framework is applied for the pose tracking of the vehicle. In the top level, a Lyapunov-based pose controller is proposed to calculate the desired force and torque. In the bottom level, a control allocation that maps the desired force and torque to desired input of the DGTM is used. An experimental prototype is built to verify the feasibility of the design scheme.