Maneuverability Analysis of a Fully-Actuated Hexrotor UAV Considering Tilt Angles and Arrangement of Rotors

Abstract

This paper tackles maneuverability analysis of a fully-actuated hexrotor unmanned aerial vehicle considering arrangement and tilt angles of 6 rotors. First, a dynamical model of the hexrotor is presented. For the model, it is proved that almost all the nonplanar hexrotor structure can be approximately simplified and transformed into planar rotor arrangement. According to the fact, symmetric-coplanar-tilted-rotor (SCTR) structure is introduced as a kind of canonical structure of hexrotors in this paper. Moreover, dynamic manipulability measure (DMM) of the hexrotor is newly defined to analyze the maneuverability, and DMM of the hexrotor with SCTR structure is found suitable for the evaluation of full-actuation property of the vehicle structure. Finally, as an example application, design optimization problems of the hexrotor are considered to show the usability of the present analysis, and the numerical example of the DMM-maximum structure is presented.