Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have slowly but steadily emerged as a research and commercial hotspot because of their widespread applications. Due to their agility, compact size, and ability to integrate multiple sensors, they are mostly sought for applications that require supplementing human effort in risky and monotonous missions. Despite all of these advantages, rotorcrafts, in general, are limited by their endurance and power-intensive flight requirements, which consequently affect the time of flight and operational range. On the other hand, fixed-wing aircrafts have an extended range, as the entire thrust force is along the direction of motion and are inherently more stable but are limited by their takeoff and landing strip requirements. One of the potential solutions to increase the endurance of VTOL rotorcrafts (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles) was to exploit the thrust vectoring ability of the individual actuators in multi-rotors, which would enable take-off and hovering as a VTOL vehicle and flight as a fixed-wing aircraft. The primary aim of this paper is to lay out the overall design process of a Hybrid VTOL tilt-rotor UAV from the initial conceptual sketch to the final fabricated prototype. The novelty of the design lies in achieving thrust vectoring capabilities in a fixed-wing platform with minimum actuation and no additional control complexity. This paper presents novel bi-copter that has been designed to perform as a hybrid configuration in both VTOL and fixed wing conditions with minimum actuators in comparison to existing designs. The unified dynamic modelling along with the approximation of multiple aerodynamic coefficients by numerical simulations is also presented. The overall conceptual design, dynamic modeling, computational simulation, and experimental analysis of the novel hybrid fixed-wing bi-copter with thrust vectoring capabilities aiming to substantially increase the flight range and endurance compared to the conventional aircraft rotorcraft configurations are presented.
Highlights
Aerial flight has been a topic of sheer interest from time immemorial since the Wright brothers built the first manned aircraft in 1903
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have created a tremendous impact on society by adding a new perspective to the way that we look at things, as they has revolutionized agriculture and farming by the application of NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) imaging and pest control [1], remote inspection, and strategic disaster management operations through the application of image processing and object detection [2], mapping, surveillance, law enforcement, social distancing, and reconnaissance operations by providing aerial footage of the region of interest for target acquisition [3]
In the VTOL flight phase, the effect of aerodynamic forces acting on the hybrid aerial vehicle is negligible, but consecutively with the tilt of motor pods, the wings generate aerodynamic lift and drag force, which can be expressed by the equation [20]:
Summary
Aerial flight has been a topic of sheer interest from time immemorial since the Wright brothers built the first manned aircraft in 1903. The ability of having a dual flight envelope makes it ideal for complex missions where both the speed and flight endurance of the fixed-wing aircraft and hovering, aggressive maneuvering, and vertical takeoff/landing capabilities of a multi-rotor are needed [4] These hybrid subclasses of UAVs have been studied and analyzed in the past few years due to their enormous utility [5,6]. The conceptual design of the VTOL tilt-rotor with a pair of counter-rotating actuators was finalized with the objective of achieving an efficient hybrid vehicle in terms of aerodynamics and overall weight This design adds to the complexity in modeling and controller design, as the entire flight profile can be divided into three different phases, i.e., the VTOL hover phase, the transition phase, and the horizontal fixed-wing flight phase.
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