Modeling and control of a novel tilt — Roll rotor quadrotor UAV

Abstract

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for military, scientific, and civilian sectors are increasing drastically in recent years. The quadrotor platform has been used for many applications and research studies, as well. One of the limiting factors that prevents further implementation of the quadrotor system into applications, is the way quadrotor moves. It needs to tilt along the desired direction of motion. By doing this it can have necessary acceleration towards that direction. But tilting has the undesired effect of moving the onboard cameras' direction of view. This becomes an issue for surveillance and other vision based tasks. This study presents the design and control of a novel quadrotor system. Unlike previous study that uses regular quadrotor, this study proposes an alternative propulsion system formed by tilting rotors. This design eliminates the need of tilting the airframe, and it suggests superior performance with respect to regular quadrotor design. The mathematical model of the tiltable-rotor type quadrotor and designed control algorithms are explained. Various simulations are developed on MATLAB, in which the proposed quadrotor aerial vehicle has been successfully controlled. Comparison of the proposed system to regular quadrotor suggests better performance.