State of the art in tilt-quadrotors, modelling, control and fault recovery

Abstract

Research studies on quadrotors have recently drawn significant interest from academia and industry. Faults and failures handling are the major weaknesses of conventional quadrotor platforms; therefore, an innovative actuation mechanism was introduced to allow tilting the rotors. Tilting rotors of multirotor platforms provide high dexterity for flying between adjacent obstacles and assist the platforms in dealing with various failure scenarios. This paper reviews the state of the research on tilt-quadrotor platforms. Several platforms, software and hardware architectures, were discussed in the literature. Most of the latest developments were focused on conventional quadrotor modelling, combined with rotor tilting dynamics. On the other hand, controlling such platform was mainly studied using two types of controllers: Feedback Linearisation technique and Control Allocator. Recovery strategy in case of fault or failure has been covered extensively for conventional quadrotors, but very limited known work for tilt-quadrotor. This review concludes that the system dynamic modelling is relatively well covered compared to exploring new control techniques for more stringent requirements. However, recovery strategies as the main advantage of tilt-quadrotor platforms are not explored extensively and require more research attention.