Design, modelling and hovering control of a tail-sitter with single thrust-vectored propeller
Wufan Wang, Jihong Zhu, Minchi Kuang
Abstract
This paper focuses on the design, modelling and hovering control of a tail-sitter with single thrust-vectored propeller which possesses the inherent advantages of both fixed wing and rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The developed tail-sitter requires only the same number of actuators as a normal fixed wing aircraft and achieves attitude control through deflections of the thrust-vectored propeller and ailerons. Thrust vectoring is realized by mounting a simple gimbal mechanism beneath the propeller motor. Both the thrust vector model and aerodynamics model are established, which leads to a complete nonlinear model of the tail-sitter in hovering state. Quaternion is applied for attitude description to avoid the singularity problem and improve computation efficiency. Through reasonable assumptions, a simplified model of the tail-sitter is obtained, based on which a backstepping controller is designed using the Lyapunov stability theory. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2017_designmodellinga,
title = {Design, modelling and hovering control of a tail-sitter with single thrust-vectored propeller},
author = {Wufan Wang and Jihong Zhu and Minchi Kuang},
booktitle = {IROS 2017},
year = {2017}
}