Embedded and Control Systems Design and Implementation of T-Shaped Tilt-Rotor Tri-copter

Tilt-rotor unmanned aircraft vehicles have gathered decent attention recently due to their vertical takeoff and landing capability, and also due to their high cruising speed. This paper focuses mainly on control systems design, simulation and practical implementation of T-shaped tilt-rotor tri-copter. The tilt-rotor mechanism of tri-copter gives the advantage to have rotational motion in both clockwise and anti-clockwise direction. The author discusses mathematical modeling of the overall system, which comprises of equations related to force, moment and orientation. Control system of tri-copter was designed in MATLAB using the standard state-space representation. In addition, the author also shares information regarding the hardware implementation of the tri-copter, and also about the test benches devised in lab for verifying and improving algorithms along the research path. Stabilization of tri-copter was accomplished through PID controller implementation on the physical systems for roll, pitch, yaw and height. Moreover, research work also includes hardware establishment of ground control station which was designed and implemented in LabVIEW for telemetry data and video transfer.