Design, Fabrication and Control of a Tilt Rotor Quadcopter

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to design, fabricate, control and experimentally study quadcopters with tilting propellers. Conventional quadcopters, due to limitation in mobility, belong to a class of under-actuated robots which cannot achieve any arbitrary desired state or configuration. The tilting rotor quadcopter provides the added advantage in terms of additional stable configurations that are made possible by additional actuated controls that convert the conventional quadcopter to a fully actuated robot. The tilting rotor quadcopter design is accomplished by using an additional motor for each rotor that enables the rotor to rotate along the axis of the quadcopter arm. The dynamic model and the controller that have been proposed and reported by the authors of this paper in the previous publications were verified with the help of numerical studies for different flight scenarios. Subsequently, two different models of the vehicle were designed, fabricated and experimentally tested for different flight plans.