Control a Fully Actuated Aerial Vehicle under Impact of Wind Disturbance

Abstract

Mobility of a standard quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is largely restricted since all of its propelling thrusts are vertical and it only possesses four degrees of freedom. As a result, traditional quadrotor UAV cannot follow the trajectory in three-dimensional space arbitrarily. The standard fixed-wing UAV performs well in high maneuvering flight. However, it cannot vertically take off, land and hover aerially. In this research, we presented a fully-actuated aircraft called Tilt-Octo with inclined propellers and only internal thrust to resist external pneumatic interference. In this way, the vehicle body is capable of keeping level flight and stable hovering under windy circumstances. Notably, the unique application was logically set up in special inspection field. A controller based on the backstepping method considering external disturbance was designed and thus altitude trajectory was ensured. In particular, the anti-wind disturbance experiments have been conducted and the results demonstrated that Tilt-Octo appear superior capabilities of stationary hovering and accurate trajectory tracking.