Large attitude change flight of a quad tilt rotor unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract

Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been actively used in various fields. However, only the altitude and the attitude in three degrees of freedom can be independently controlled since quadrotor UAVs are underactuated systems. A quad tilt rotor UAV solves the problem of an underactuated system in a general quadrotor UAV. The quad tilt rotor UAV can control both position and attitude independently by tilting the directions of the propellers. However, the flight control system in a wide range of attitudes has not been discussed yet, for example a UAV can fly and hover with a 90 pitch angle, and it can even flip over when the thrust direction is tilted in a wide enough range. In this paper, we present the attitude transition flight control system for pitch angles ranging from 0 to 90 since flight conditions with a 90 pitch angle significantly differs from that in a conventional quadrotor UAV flight. We construct an adequate control system for a flight with a wide range of attitude conditions.