Rigid airborne docking between a fixed-wing UAV and an over-actuated multicopter

Fixed-wing aircraft fly longer, faster, and further than rotorcraft, but cannot take off or land vertically. Hybrid drones combine VTOL with a wing for forward flight, but the hovering system generally makes them less efficient than a pure fixed-wing. We propose an alternative, in which a rotorcraft is used to assist the fixed-wing UAV with the...

Synthetic Air Data System for Pitot Tube Failure Detection on the Variable Skew Quad Plane

Pitot tube-free airspeed estimation methods exist for fixed-wing and multirotor configurations, but lack direct applicability to hybrid unmanned air vehicles due to their wide flight envelope and changing dynamics during transition. This work proposes a novel synthetic air data system for the Variable Skew Quad Plane (VSQP) hybrid vehicle to...

Computationally Efficient Control Allocation Using Active-Set Algorithms

An effective distribution of flight control commands over many aircraft actuators (engines, control surfaces, flaps, etc.) can be achieved with constrained optimisation. Active-Set methods solve these problems efficiently, but their computational time requirements are still prohibitive for aircraft with many actuators or slower digital flight...

Towards landing a deep-stalled flying-wing in a powered flat spin: a proof of concept

Flying-wings show great potential for a vast number of applications, in both commercial and military sectors, thanks to their long range and fast forward flight, but suffer due to their lack of vertical take-off and landing capabilities. This paper presents a proof of concept for a novel landing method for a conventional flying wing that does...

Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion Controller for a Variable Skew Quad Plane

This paper presents the design of an Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) controller for the novel platform VSQP. Part of the identified challenges is the develop- ment of a model for the actuator effectiveness and lift especially as a function of skew, the newly added degree of freedom. In particular it is assumed that the actuator...

We fly as one: Design and Joint Control of a Conjoined Biplane and Quadrotor

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs, serve many purposes<br/>these days, such as short-range inspections<br/>and long-distance search and rescue missions. Long-distance missions can entail a search in a building. Such missions require a large aircraft for endurance and a small aircraft for manoeuvrability in a building.<br/><br/>This paper proposes a...

Feasibility of using electric drone main rotors for electricity generation vs. solar panels for indefinite flight

An idea was proposed to allow an autonomous drone to have indefinite flight times over the ocean by applying renewable energy technologies and theory to generate electricity in flight. This is considered less as a way to save energy, but to permit the use of such a drone from a ship not capable of safely retrieving it. One novel component of...

Attitude Control of Flapping-Wing Air Vehicles

Flapping-Wing Air Vehicles (FWAV) are autonomously flying vehicles that use their flapping wings to simultaneously stay aloft and enable controllable flight. FWAVs that are capable of controllable flight are reported in literature, though a theoretical background of the aerodynamic performance of different attitude control mechanisms is absent...