Voliro: An Omnidirectional Hexacopter With Tiltable Rotors

TL;DR

Voliro introduces an innovative omnidirectional hexacopter with tiltable rotors, enhancing maneuverability and control for complex inspection tasks and smooth camera movements, demonstrated through real-world experiments.

Contribution

This paper presents the mechanical design and control scheme of a novel hexacopter with tiltable rotors, enabling decoupled position and orientation control.

Findings

Demonstrated increased maneuverability in real-world tests

Successfully decoupled control of position and orientation

Validated the design through prototype experiments

Abstract

Extending the maneuverability of unmanned areal vehicles promises to yield a considerable increase in the areas in which these systems can be used. Some such applications are the performance of more complicated inspection tasks and the generation of complex uninterrupted movements of an attached camera. In this paper we address this challenge by presenting Voliro, a novel aerial platform that combines the advantages of existing multi-rotor systems with the agility of omnidirectionally controllable platforms. We propose the use of a hexacopter with tiltable rotors allowing the system to decouple the control of position and orientation. The contributions of this work involve the mechanical design as well as a controller with the corresponding allocation scheme. This work also discusses the design challenges involved when turning the concept of a hexacopter with tiltable rotors into an actual prototype. The agility of the system is demonstrated and evaluated in real- world experiments.