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Abstract
Most of the spherical unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) use control surfaces, which are functions of aileron and an elevator, to generate control torque. The work proposes a new conceptual design of an SUAV system controlled through center-of-gravity (CG) variations with its path-tracking control law designed for the system. Compared to the one using control surfaces, the concept suggested is beneficial in the aspect of the expandability of building lighter and smaller SUAVs, especially. A CG variation principle by actuating a pendulum type of a moving part is considered as a methodology for both translational and rotational motion control of an SUAV. Since variations of the moment-of-inertia (MOI) elements which resulted from the motion of the moving part affect the performance of the suggested method, the variations of MOI analysis are performed for all angular ranges of the moving part. As a result, certain angular ranges for the moving part to prevent the degradation of the path-tracking performance by the effect of the MOI changes are found. By considering the findings, numerical studies are performed for hovering, ascent, descent, and horizontal tracking missions. The applicability of the proposed SUAV system and the corresponding controller to achieve the path-tracking missions is demonstrated through the numerical simulation.
Highlights
Researches for the various shapes of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been performed continuously because of the variety of UAVs’ application areas: reconnaissance, delivery, rescue, monitoring, etc. [1,2,3,4]
Malandrakis et al and Loh and Jacob demonstrated spherical UAVs (SUAVs) consist of a contrarotating motor and several control vanes [5, 6]
Kim et al developed a rotary-wing micro aerial vehicle that has the same concept of operations as an SUAV using a single motor, four antitorque vanes, and three control vanes [8]
Summary
Researches for the various shapes of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been performed continuously because of the variety of UAVs’ application areas: reconnaissance, delivery, rescue, monitoring, etc. [1,2,3,4]. As one of the techniques for generating the control torque, the moving center-of-gravity (CG) was studied and considered in attitude and position controls. Control law are applied to manipulate position and attitude, respectively All these SUAVs have vanes to control their attitude. These vanes are usually designed according to how much aerodynamic forces generate torques to control attitudes Since these forces depend on the size of vanes, the size of the SUAV might be determined by the size of the vane. To generate more torques for largeangle maneuvers, a mass of the moving part or distance between a pivot point and the moving part must be increased Varying these two factors, results in the variation of MOI components, which is not negligible. The applicability of the suggested methodology is validated through numerical simulation studies
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