Abstract
Tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles have attracted increasing attention due to their ability to perform vertical take-off and landing and their high-speed cruising abilities, thereby presenting broad application prospects. Considering portability and applications in tasks characterized by constrained or small scope areas, this article presents a compact tricopter configuration tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with full modes of flight from the rotor mode to the fixed-wing mode and vice versa. The unique multiple modes make the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle a multi-input multi-output, non-affine, multi-channel cross coupling, and nonlinear system. Considering these characteristics, a control allocation method is designed to make the controller adaptive to the full modes of flight. To reduce the cost, the accurate dynamic model of the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle is not obtained, so a full-mode flight strategy is designed in view of this situation. An autonomous flight test was conducted, and the results indicate the satisfactory performance of the control allocation method and flight strategy.
Highlights
Vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicles (VTOL UAVs) have become a focus of UAV research
Aiming at portability and tasks characterized by constrained small scope areas, a tricopter configuration tiltrotor UAV prototype is developed
The tilt-rotor UAV adopts differential tilting of the front rotors, therein reducing the number of actuators compared to other tricopter configuration tilt-rotor UAVs such as TURAC and FireFLY6
Summary
Vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicles (VTOL UAVs) have become a focus of UAV research. The lateral control adopts the L1 navigation logic,[26] which combines the current position of UAV and a reference point on the flight path at a distance L1 to generate the lateral acceleration command a cmd a cmd 1⁄4. The virtual control commands are the weighted sum of the outputs of the rotor and fixed-wing modes. The mixer needs to distribute the weights of the rotor and fixed-wing modes according to the efficiency and modify the mapping relationship according to the current tilting angle. The 1⁄21; 2; 3T can be obtained as
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