Attitude Control of a Tilt-rotor Tailsitter Micro Air Vehicle Using Incremental Control

By combining the ability to hover with a wing for fast and efficient horizontal flight, hybrid unmanned aircraft extend the flight envelope and therefore mission capabilities of unmanned aircraft. However, this comes at a cost: increased complexity control-wise and being more susceptible to wind disturbances. This susceptibility to wind gusts is...

Hover and fast flight of minimum-mass mission-capable flying robots

Highly automated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or "flying robots" are rapidly becoming an important asset to society. The last decade has seen the advent of an impressive number of new UAV types and applications. For many applications, the UAVs need to be safe, highly automated, and versatile. Safety is a prerequisite to allowing their use in...

Wind tunnel tests of a wing at all angles of attack

Tailsitters have complex aerodynamics that make them hard to control throughout the entire flight envelope, especially at very high angle of attack (AoA) and reverse flow conditions. The development of controllers for these vehicles is hampered by the absence of publicly available data on forces and moments experienced in such conditions. In...

Modeling the unstable DelftaCopter vertical take-off and landing tailsitter unmanned air vehicle in hover and forward flight from flight test data

The DelftaCopter is a tilt-body tailsitter unmanned air vehicle which combines a large swashplate controlled helicopter rotor with a biplane delta-wing. Previous research has shown that the large moment of inertia of the wing and fuselage significantly interacts with the dynamics of the rotor. While this rigid rotor cylinder dynamics model...

Incremental Control of Hybrid Micro Air Vehicles

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) can perform many useful tasks, such as mapping and delivery. For these tasks either rotorcraft are used, which can hover but are not very efficient, or fixed wing vehicles, which are efficient but can not hover. Hybrid MAVs combine the hovering of a rotorcraft with the efficiency of a fixed wing. The reason that these...