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 particularly problematic for tailsitters as during hovering and vertical flight their wing is perpendicular to horizontal wind disturbances, often leading to actuator saturation. This paper presents a novel tailsitter micro air vehicle with two leading edge tilting rotors serving as its only actuators. It is shown that thrust vectoring generates sufficient control moment generation alleviating actuator saturation. Incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) is implemented for attitude control and is demonstrated to compensate for unmodeled forces and moments whilst only relying on actuator control effectiveness and knowledge of actuator dynamics.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) market is growing, as the field of application becomes increasingly diverse. Various missions performed by UAVs such as transport, surveillance and monitoring missions can be less challenging and more efficient compared to missions carried out by manned aircraft. The new design principle of combining a helicopter and a conventional aircraft has been proven to be prominent, as it allows a UAV to be versatile and have capability of being retrofitted to different mission profiles; these Hybrid UAVs are able to operate at broader conditions, as they can take-off and land without a runway and have a horizontal flight performance of a conventional aircraft.