Design and implementation of a gasoline-electric hybrid propulsion system for a micro triple tilt-rotor VTOL UAV

Abstract

Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aerial vehicles have been a hot topic in the aerospace field, since they possess joint advantages of the multi-rotor drone and the fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In this paper, a novel propulsion scheme is proposed for a micro triple tilt-rotor VTOL prototype. Furthermore, the design, implementation and analysis of a gasoline-electric hybrid propulsion system are respectively presented. Hybrid power architecture is designed with constraints on the characteristics of the power-plants and the energy and is based on three fundamental hybrid-electric configurations. The dynamic model and attitude control principle is also given for this triple tilt-rotor VTOL UAV. Dynamics performance testing is conducted by flight experiments of the developed micro triple tilt-rotor VTOL prototype.