A Hybrid Tricopter/Flying-Wing VTOL UAV

Carlson, Stephen

doi:10.2514/6.2014-0016

Cited by 27 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…1 Some large-scale examples of such tilt-rotor UAVs include the Bell Eagle Eye, 2 SMART UAV 3 developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, and the IAI Panther. 4 Moreover, many smaller scale tilt-rotor UAVs have been developed, including FireFLY6, 5 Orange Hawk, 6 TURAC, 7 and TRON 8 shown in Figure 1.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Control and flight test of a tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle

Chen

Zhang

et al. 2017

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

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Tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles have attracted increasing attention due to their ability to perform vertical takeoff and landing and their high-speed cruising abilities, thereby presenting broad application prospects. Considering portability and applications in tasks characterized by constrained or small scope areas, this article presents a compact tricopter configuration tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with full modes of flight from the rotor mode to the fixed-wing mode and vice versa. The unique multiple modes make the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle a multi-input multi-output, non-affine, multi-channel cross coupling, and nonlinear system. Considering these characteristics, a control allocation method is designed to make the controller adaptive to the full modes of flight. To reduce the cost, the accurate dynamic model of the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle is not obtained, so a full-mode flight strategy is designed in view of this situation. An autonomous flight test was conducted, and the results indicate the satisfactory performance of the control allocation method and flight strategy.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Control and flight test of a tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle

Chen

Zhang

et al. 2017

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

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“…Fig. 3 shows these different kind of hybrid UAVs [18][19][20][21] . A comparison among different UAVs is listed as Table 1.…”

Section: Comparison With Other Uavsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Lifting Wing Fixed on Multirotor UAVs for Long Flight Ranges

Xiao

Meng

Dai

et al. 2020

Preprint

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This paper presents a lifting-wing multirotor UAV that allows long-range flight. The UAV features a lifting wing in a special mounting angle that works together with rotors to supply lift when it flies forward, achieving a reduction in energy consumption and improvement of flight range compared to traditional multirotor UAVs. Its dynamic model is built according to the classical multirotor theory and the fixed-wing theory, as the aerodynamics of its multiple propellers and that of its lifting wing are almost decoupled. Its design takes into consideration aerodynamics, airframe configuration and the mounting angle. The performance of the UAV is verified by experiments, which show that the lifting wing saves 50.14% of the power when the UAV flies at the cruise speed (15m/s).

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“…The tail-sitter [8] may also be considered, though it only incorporates the forward thrust motors of the fixed-wing, meaning that it is capable of VTOL but lacks any hover capability. Other unique placements of vertical thrust rotors may also be possible such as in [9]. Nevertheless, the most simple and straightforward hybridization approach is the separate-lift-and-thrust (SLT) hybrid, as shown in Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving the Flight Endurance of a Separate-Lift-and-Thrust Hybrid through Gaussian Process Optimization

Ng¹,

Chua²

2021

International Journal on Advanced Science, Engineering and Information Technology

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A separate-lift-and-thrust hybrid is a modified fixed-wing drone which includes quadcopter rotors. This results in the combined capability of forwarding flight as well as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), making it a low-cost method that can deliver substantial gains in utility. Though this is a strong point compared to other types of VTOL drones, the hybrid design may incur a significant trade-off because added weight and drag can severely reduce the drone's flight endurance. This study attempts to mitigate the impact by improving the configuration of the selection and positioning parameters. Since drag estimations are costly, a Gaussian process optimization method was performed, as it is economical with respect to the required number of iterations. A set of arbitrarily selected components was prepared for use with the optimization method, recording the relevant performance data and constructing the CAD models of the components for use in simulations. The optimization method was able to increase the estimated flight endurance to 27.99 minutes, a significant improvement compared to a set of random configurations, which only yielded 9.54 minutes at best. The respectable result was obtained even though difficulties were experienced regarding the infeasible regions that arise from the many constraints. Future implementation of this optimization approach can be further improved. It may be worthwhile to utilize a low-fidelity model from the base fixed-wing drone simulations, in contrast with using an initial zero mean for the prior of the Gaussian process.

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A Hybrid Tricopter/Flying-Wing VTOL UAV

Cited by 27 publications

References 4 publications

Control and flight test of a tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle

Control and flight test of a tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle

A Lifting Wing Fixed on Multirotor UAVs for Long Flight Ranges

Improving the Flight Endurance of a Separate-Lift-and-Thrust Hybrid through Gaussian Process Optimization

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