Gimballed Rotor Mechanism for Omnidirectional Quadrotors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, modular gimballed rotor mechanism for omnidirectional quadrotors, enabling full six-degree-of-freedom control with a novel control scheme and successful flight validation.

Contribution

It presents a new gimballed rotor design that achieves full actuation in quadrotors without major structural modifications, along with a tailored control allocation scheme.

Findings

Successful flight tests demonstrate effective omnidirectional control.

The design maintains lightweight and easy integration.

The control scheme effectively manages independent rotor tilting.

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a gimballed rotor mechanism as a modular and efficient solution for constructing omnidirectional quadrotors. Unlike conventional quadrotors, which are underactuated, this class of quadrotors achieves full actuation, enabling independent motion in all six degrees of freedom. While existing omnidirectional quadrotor designs often require significant structural modifications, the proposed gimballed rotor system maintains a lightweight and easy-to-integrate design by incorporating servo motors within the rotor platforms, allowing independent tilting of each rotor without major alterations to the central structure of a quadrotor. To accommodate this unconventional design, we develop a new control allocation scheme in PX4 Autopilot and present successful flight tests, validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.