A fully actuated quadrotor UAV with a propeller tilting mechanism: Modeling and control

Abstract

Equipped with four actuators, quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles belong to the family of underactuated systems. The lateral motion of such platforms is strongly coupled with their orientation and consequently it is not possible to track an arbitrary 6D trajectory in space. In this paper, we propose a novel quadrotor design in which the tilt angles of the propellers with respect to the quadrotor body are being simultaneously controlled with two additional actuators by employing the parallelogram principle. Since the velocity of the controlled tilt angles of the propellers does not appear directly in the derived dynamic model, the system cannot be static feedback linearized. Nevertheless, the system is linearizable at a higher differential order, leading to a dynamic feedback linearization controller. Simulations confirm the theoretical findings, highlighting the improved motion capabilities with respect to standard quadrotors.