Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have slowly but steadily emerged as a research and commercial hotspot because of their widespread applications. Due to their agility, compact size, and ability to integrate multiple sensors, they are mostly sought for applications that require supplementing human effort in risky and monotonous missions. Despite all of these advantages, rotorcrafts, in general, are limited by their endurance and power-intensive flight requirements, which consequently affect the time of flight and operational range. On the other hand, fixed-wing aircrafts have an extended range, as the entire thrust force is along the direction of motion and are inherently more stable but are limited by their takeoff and landing strip requirements. One of the potential solutions to increase the endurance of VTOL rotorcrafts (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles) was to exploit the thrust vectoring ability of the individual actuators in multi-rotors, which would enable take-off and hovering as a VTOL vehicle and flight as a fixed-wing aircraft. The primary aim of this paper is to lay out the overall design process of a Hybrid VTOL tilt-rotor UAV from the initial conceptual sketch to the final fabricated prototype. The novelty of the design lies in achieving thrust vectoring capabilities in a fixed-wing platform with minimum actuation and no additional control complexity. This paper presents novel bi-copter that has been designed to perform as a hybrid configuration in both VTOL and fixed wing conditions with minimum actuators in comparison to existing designs. The unified dynamic modelling along with the approximation of multiple aerodynamic coefficients by numerical simulations is also presented. The overall conceptual design, dynamic modeling, computational simulation, and experimental analysis of the novel hybrid fixed-wing bi-copter with thrust vectoring capabilities aiming to substantially increase the flight range and endurance compared to the conventional aircraft rotorcraft configurations are presented.

Real-time biodiversity analysis using deep-learning algorithms on mobile robotic platforms

“…In comparison to the existing methodologies, the use of mobile platforms can address the problems of skewed species distribution by its mobility, as well as overcome the limitations of increased deployment of stationary sensors for better ground coverage. However, several critical challenges are also introduced, such as battery limitations, sensor shortcomings, sampling rates of sensor platforms, geographical footprints of these aerial robots, onboard memory requirements, and selection of computationally efficient algorithms which must be thoroughly evaluated for such real-time applications ( McEvoy, Hall & McDonald, 2016 ; Panigrahi, Krishna & Thondiyath, 2021 ). This section provides an overview of the proposed methodology adopted to develop the real-time biodiversity map using aerial imagery to address some of the above-mentioned challenges.…”

Design and Analysis of Hybrid Fixed-Wing Type Flying Robot

“…Gunarathna and Munasinghe [7] developed a quartered fixed-wing hybrid flying robot with excellent performance in takeoff and landing autonomously. Siddhant Panigrahi et al [8] proposed the design and detailed inspection and evaluation of a hybrid VTOL tilt-rotor UAV for enhanced performance. Harikrishnan [9] discussed in his paper about strength and efficiency of tiltrotor vertical takeoff type by copter UAVs.…”

Study on Ducted Vertical Take-Off and Landing Fixed-Wing UAV Dynamics Modeling and Transition Corridor

“…The transition beginning window usually meets a certain safety height. In this paper, based on the experience of helicopters, this height is set as 20 m. The transition ending window usually has three important flight parameters, namely, flight speed, power thrust, and attitude of the UAV, which can be calculated via Formula ( 8)- (10):…”

“…Sergio Garcia-Nieto [9] studied unmanned aerial vehicles operating in this configuration, which were also categorized as hybrid UAVs due to dual flight envelope-hovering like a multi-rotor and cruising like a traditional fixed-wing, the two different dynamics enable UAVs to carry out complex missions. Siddhant Panigrahi et al [10] discussed the overall conceptual design, dynamic modeling, computational simulation, and experimental analysis of the novel hybrid fixedwing bicopter with thrust vectoring capabilities, with the aim of substantially increasing the flight range and endurance compared to conventional aircraft rotorcraft configurations. Cao Yunyun [11,12] proposed a power system of the tilt angle-speed envelope of the transitional flight from vertical take-off and landing to horizontal flight for this kind of aircraft.…”