A high-performance structural aircraft: Modeling and control

The simple mechanical structure makes traditional quadrotor widely used. However, some mechanical properties that hinders its further development, such as under-actuation and limited speed when moving horizontally. Taking these issues into account, a novel quadrotor is presented in this paper while its propellers are allowed to tilt about their axes. As a result, the drawback of the under-actuation of the quadrotor is avodied. For this quadrotor, eight control inputs are provided for the six control outputs. In except to system dynamics analysis and modeling, a PID controller is further developed to make the quadrotor available to flight in any attitude. The applicability of the proposed design method is verified by simulation results. It is demonstrated that the proposed high-performance structural aircraft has more superior performance than the traditional quadrotor.