Design, development, and flight testing of a tube-launched coaxial-rotor based micro air vehicle

Abstract

This paper describes the development and flight testing of a compact, re-configurable, hover-capable rotary-wing micro air vehicle that could be tube launched for increasing mission range. The vehicle design features a coaxial rotor with foldable blades, thrust-vectoring mechanism for pitch/roll control and differential rpm for yaw control. The vehicle was stabilized using a cascaded feedback controller implemented on a 1.7-gram custom-designed autopilot. Wind tunnel tests conducted using a single-degree-of-freedom stand demonstrated gust-tolerance up to 5  m/s, which was verified via flight testing. Finally, the 366-gram vehicle was launched vertically from a pneumatic cannon followed by a stable projectile phase, passive rotor unfolding, and transition to a stable hover from arbitrarily large attitude angles demonstrating the robustness of the controller.