Robotics Laboratory, Department of Engineering Design, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India.
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036, India.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Sep 7;21(18):5987. doi: 10.3390/s21185987.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have slowly but steadily emerged as a research and commercial hotspot because of their widespread applications. Due to their agility, compact size, and ability to integrate multiple sensors, they are mostly sought for applications that require supplementing human effort in risky and monotonous missions. Despite all of these advantages, rotorcrafts, in general, are limited by their endurance and power-intensive flight requirements, which consequently affect the time of flight and operational range. On the other hand, fixed-wing aircrafts have an extended range, as the entire thrust force is along the direction of motion and are inherently more stable but are limited by their takeoff and landing strip requirements. One of the potential solutions to increase the endurance of VTOL rotorcrafts (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles) was to exploit the thrust vectoring ability of the individual actuators in multi-rotors, which would enable take-off and hovering as a VTOL vehicle and flight as a fixed-wing aircraft. The primary aim of this paper is to lay out the overall design process of a Hybrid VTOL tilt-rotor UAV from the initial conceptual sketch to the final fabricated prototype. The novelty of the design lies in achieving thrust vectoring capabilities in a fixed-wing platform with minimum actuation and no additional control complexity. This paper presents novel bi-copter that has been designed to perform as a hybrid configuration in both VTOL and fixed wing conditions with minimum actuators in comparison to existing designs. The unified dynamic modelling along with the approximation of multiple aerodynamic coefficients by numerical simulations is also presented. The overall conceptual design, dynamic modeling, computational simulation, and experimental analysis of the novel hybrid fixed-wing bi-copter with thrust vectoring capabilities aiming to substantially increase the flight range and endurance compared to the conventional aircraft rotorcraft configurations are presented.
无人飞行器（UAV）由于其广泛的应用而逐渐成为研究和商业热点。由于其灵活性、紧凑的尺寸和能够集成多个传感器，它们主要用于需要在危险和单调的任务中补充人力的应用。尽管有所有这些优势，但旋翼机一般受到其续航能力和高能量消耗的飞行要求的限制，这反过来又影响了飞行时间和运行范围。另一方面，固定翼飞机的航程更长，因为整个推力都沿着运动方向，并且本身更稳定，但受到起飞和降落跑道要求的限制。增加垂直起降（VTOL）旋翼机（垂直起降车辆）续航能力的一种潜在解决方案是利用多旋翼中各个执行器的推力矢量能力，这将使它们能够作为 VTOL 飞行器起飞和悬停，并作为固定翼飞机飞行。本文的主要目的是从最初的概念草图到最终制造的原型，阐述混合 VTOL 倾转旋翼无人机的总体设计过程。设计的新颖之处在于在固定翼平台上实现推力矢量能力，同时具有最小的激励和无额外的控制复杂性。本文提出了一种新型的双旋翼飞机，它被设计为在 VTOL 和固定翼条件下以混合配置运行，与现有设计相比，使用的执行器数量最少。还提出了统一的动力学建模以及通过数值模拟对多个空气动力学系数的近似。本文介绍了具有推力矢量能力的新型混合固定翼双旋翼飞机的总体概念设计、动力学建模、计算仿真和实验分析，旨在与传统的旋翼机飞机配置相比，大幅提高飞行范围和续航能力。
