3 research outputs found
The Phoenix Drone: An Open-Source Dual-Rotor Tail-Sitter Platform for Research and Education
In this paper, we introduce the Phoenix drone: the first completely
open-source tail-sitter micro aerial vehicle (MAV) platform. The vehicle has a
highly versatile, dual-rotor design and is engineered to be low-cost and easily
extensible/modifiable. Our open-source release includes all of the design
documents, software resources, and simulation tools needed to build and fly a
high-performance tail-sitter for research and educational purposes. The drone
has been developed for precision flight with a high degree of control
authority. Our design methodology included extensive testing and
characterization of the aerodynamic properties of the vehicle. The platform
incorporates many off-the-shelf components and 3D-printed parts, in order to
keep the cost down. Nonetheless, the paper includes results from flight trials
which demonstrate that the vehicle is capable of very stable hovering and
accurate trajectory tracking. Our hope is that the open-source Phoenix
reference design will be useful to both researchers and educators. In
particular, the details in this paper and the available open-source materials
should enable learners to gain an understanding of aerodynamics, flight
control, state estimation, software design, and simulation, while experimenting
with a unique aerial robot.Comment: In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA'19), Montreal, Canada, May 20-24, 201
Quadrotor Control in the Presence of Unknown Mass Properties
Quadrotor UAVs are popular due to their mechanical simplicity, as well as their capability to hover and vertically take-off and land. As applications diversify, quadrotors are increasingly required to operate under unknown mass properties, for example as a multirole sensor platform or for package delivery operations. The work presented here consists of the derivation of a generalized quadrotor dynamic model without the typical simplifying assumptions on the first and second moments of mass. The maximum payload capacity of a quadrotor in hover, and the observability of the unknown mass properties are discussed. A brief introduction of L1 adaptive control is provided, and three different L1 adaptive controllers were designed for the Parrot AR.Drone quadrotor. Their tracking and disturbance rejection performance was compared to the baseline nonlinear controller in experiments. Finally, the results of the combination of L1 adaptive control with iterative learning control are presented, showing high performance trajectory tracking under uncertainty.M.A.S