Flight control systems of a quad tilt rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for a large attitude change

TLDR

Quad tilt rotor UAVs address the underactuated nature of conventional quadrotors by independently controlling position and attitude through propeller tilting, yet flight control across a wide attitude range remains unexplored. The study introduces an attitude‑transition flight control system enabling stable flight for pitch angles from 0° to 90°. The control system uses a tilting‑motor design that permits hovering at 90° pitch and flipping when the motor range is wide enough, and its performance was experimentally validated across 0°–90° pitch angles. Experimental validation confirms that the proposed control system achieves stable flight across the full 0°–90° pitch range.

Abstract

Quad tilt rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) solves the problem of underacuated system in general quadrotor UAV. The quad tilt rotor UAV can control position and attitude independently by tilting directions of propellers. However, the flight control system in a wide range of attitudes has not been discussed yet, e.g. a UAV flying and hovering with a 90 [°] pitch angle and can flip over when the range of the tilting motor rotates wide enough. In this paper, we present the attitude transition flight control system for pitch angles ranging 0 [°] to 90 [°] since flight condition with a 90 [°] pitch angle significantly differs from that in a conventional quadrotor UAV flight, and then adequate control system and sufficient experimental validation are necessary for stable flight in a wide range of attitude conditions.