Star-shaped Tilted Hexarotor Maneuverability: Analysis of the Role of the Tilt Cant Angles

TL;DR

This paper rigorously analyzes how tilt cant angles affect the force capabilities of star-shaped tilted hexarotors, providing new metrics and guidelines for optimizing their maneuverability and robustness.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed force subspace analysis considering gravity and torque decoupling, along with novel performance metrics for tilt angle selection.

Findings

Force subspace varies significantly with tilt angles.

New metrics effectively evaluate platform performance.

Guidelines improve design choices for maneuverability.

Abstract

Star-shaped Tilted Hexarotors are rapidly emerging for applications highly demanding in terms of robustness and maneuverability. To ensure improvement in such features, a careful selection of the tilt angles is mandatory. In this work, we present a rigorous analysis of how the force subspace varies with the tilt cant angles, namely the tilt angles along the vehicle arms, taking into account gravity compensation and torque decoupling to abide by the hovering condition. Novel metrics are introduced to assess the performance of existing tilted platforms, as well as to provide some guidelines for the selection of the tilt cant angle in the design phase.