MOMAV: A highly symmetrical fully-actuated multirotor drone using optimizing control allocation

Abstract

MOMAV (Marco’s Omnidirectional Micro Aerial Vehicle) is a multirotor drone that is fully actuated, meaning it can control its orientation independently of its position. MOMAV is also highly symmetrical, making its flight efficiency largely unaffected by its current orientation. These characteristics are achieved by a novel drone design where six rotor arms align with the vertices of an octahedron, and where each arm can actively rotate along its long axis. Various standout features of MOMAV are presented: The high flight efficiency compared to arm configuration of other fully-actuated drones, the design of an original rotating arm assembly featuring slip-rings used to enable continuous arm rotation, and a novel control allocation algorithm based on sequential quadratic programming (SQP) used to calculate throttle and arm-angle setpoints in flight. Flight tests have shown that MOMAV is able to achieve remarkably low mean position/orientation errors of 6.6 mm, 2.1°($\sigma$: 3.0 mm, 1.0°) when sweeping position setpoints, and 11.8 mm, 3.3°($\sigma$: 8.6 mm, 2.0°) when sweeping orientation setpoints.