The ODQuad: Design and Experimental Validation of a Novel Fully-actuated Quadrotor

Abstract

This work experimentally validates a novel fully-actuated quadrotor-based unmanned aerial vehicle named ODQuad (OmniDirectional Quadrotor). The ODQuad is composed of three main parts arranged in a gimbal configuration. The internal mechanism is composed of two rotational joints with orthogonal and incident axes which allow to decouple the horizontal motions from the vehicle body rolling and pitching. Firstly, the physical prototype is presented and the motion controller, inherited by [1], has been tailored in such a way to integrate the servo actuators of the internal gimbal mechanism. Three trajectories have been commanded to prove the decoupling between the position and attitude motion. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed multirotor design.