Quad-cone-rotor: A Novel Tilt Quadrotor with Severe-fault-tolerant Ability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel quad-tilt-rotor design called quad-cone-rotor, which offers enhanced maneuverability and fault-tolerance by allowing thrust vectors along a cone shape, demonstrated through MATLAB simulations.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new quad-tilt-rotor design with thrust along a cone, improving agility and fault-tolerance over conventional quadrotors.

Findings

Demonstrated improved control agility in simulations.

Showed potential for fault-tolerant operation under severe failures.

Validated design effectiveness through MATLAB simulations.

Abstract

Conventional quadrotors received great attention in trajectory design and fault-tolerant control in these years. The direction of each thrust is perpendicular to the body because of the geometrics in mechanical design. Comparing with the conventional quadrotor, a novel quadrotor named quad-tilt-rotor brings better freedom in manipulating the thrust vector. Quad-tilt-rotor augments the additional degrees of freedom in the thrust, providing the possibility of violating the normal direction of the thrust in the conventional quadrotor. This provides the ability of greater agility in control. This paper presents a novel design of a quad-tilt-rotor (quad-cone-rotor) whose thrust can be assigned along the edge of a cone shape. Besides the inheriting merits in agile from quad-tilt-rotor, the quad-cone-rotor is expected to take fault-tolerant control in severe dynamic failure (total loss in all thrusts). We simulate the control result in a UAV simulator in SIMULINK, MATLAB.