Conceptual Design and Test of a Tilting Quadrotor Morphing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Adaptive Foldable Wings

Abstract

AbstractTo improve the flight speed and endurance of the conventional quadrotor Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), a basic idea is to add wings on the surface of the multi-rotor UAV. However, our preliminary experiments found that the wings directly added to this UAV may cause negative lift during forwarding flight at a negative angle of attack. To solve this problem, this article explores the conceptual design and test of a novel tilting quadrotor morphing UAV with adaptive foldable wings. Overall and structural design are first described. Then the modeling and control of the UAV are provided based on the Newton-Euler method and typical cascade feedback control method. Besides, the aerodynamic characteristics of the UAV are analyzed based on the computation fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to show the influence of the tilt angle and attack angle. Finally, the flight experiments are conducted to verify the rationality and feasibility of the UAV design and control algorithm. The added adaptive foldable wings are proved to be able to effectively increase the maximum flight speed and range by 41% and 36% compared with those of the same type of UAV without wings.KeywordsUAVDesignTiltingControlAdaptive wing