TiltDrone: A Fully-Actuated Tilting Quadrotor Platform

Peter Zheng; Xinkai Tan; Basaran Bahadir Kocer; Erdeng Yang; Mirko Kovac

doi:10.1109/LRA.2020.3010460

TiltDrone: A Fully-Actuated Tilting Quadrotor Platform

Peter Zheng, Xinkai Tan, Basaran Bahadir Kocer, Erdeng Yang, Mirko Kovac^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Aerospace Engineering

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review

79 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Multi-directional aerial platforms can fly in almost any orientation and direction, often maneuvering in ways their underactuated counterparts cannot match. A subset of multi-directional platforms is fully-actuated multirotors, where all six degrees of freedom are independently controlled without redundancies. Fully-actuated multirotors possess much greater freedom of movement than conventional multirotor drones, allowing them to perform complex sensing and manipulation tasks. While there has been comprehensive research on multi-directional multirotor control systems, the spectrum of hardware designs remains fragmented. This letter sets out the hardware design architecture of a fully-actuated quadrotor and its associated control framework. Following the novel platform design, a prototype was built to validate the control scheme and characterize the flight performance. The resulting quadrotor was shown in operation to be capable of holding a stationary hover at 30° incline, and track position commands by thrust vectoring [Video attachment: https://youtu.be/8HOQl_77CVg].

Original language	English
Article number	9144371
Pages (from-to)	6845-6852
Number of pages	8
Journal	IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume	5
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2020.3010460
Publication status	Published - Oct 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received February 24, 2020; accepted June 24, 2020. Date of publication July 20, 2020; date of current version September 15, 2020. This letter was recommended for publication by Associate Editor F. Ruggiero and Editor J. Roberts upon evaluation of the Reviewers’ comments. This work was supported in part by the Natural Environment Research Council under Grant NE/L002515/1, in part by the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London; the South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under Grants EP/R009953/1, EP/N018494/1, EP/R026173/1, and EP/S031464/1, in part by the EU H2020 AeroTwin project under Grant 810321. The work of M. Kovac was supported by the Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship under Grant RSWF/R1/18003. The Multi-Terrain Aerial Robotics Arena is supported through a philanthropic gift by Brahmal Vasudevan. (Peter Zheng and Xinkai Tan contributed equally to this work.) (Corresponding author: Mirko Kovac.) Peter Zheng is with the Aerial Robotics Laboratory, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, U.K., and also with the Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP and the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, (e-mail: [email protected]).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.

Keywords

aerial systems: applications
Aerial systems: mechanics and control
mechanism design

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title = "TiltDrone: A Fully-Actuated Tilting Quadrotor Platform",

abstract = "Multi-directional aerial platforms can fly in almost any orientation and direction, often maneuvering in ways their underactuated counterparts cannot match. A subset of multi-directional platforms is fully-actuated multirotors, where all six degrees of freedom are independently controlled without redundancies. Fully-actuated multirotors possess much greater freedom of movement than conventional multirotor drones, allowing them to perform complex sensing and manipulation tasks. While there has been comprehensive research on multi-directional multirotor control systems, the spectrum of hardware designs remains fragmented. This letter sets out the hardware design architecture of a fully-actuated quadrotor and its associated control framework. Following the novel platform design, a prototype was built to validate the control scheme and characterize the flight performance. The resulting quadrotor was shown in operation to be capable of holding a stationary hover at 30° incline, and track position commands by thrust vectoring [Video attachment: https://youtu.be/8HOQl_77CVg].",

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TiltDrone: A Fully-Actuated Tilting Quadrotor Platform

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