TiltDrone: A Fully-Actuated Tilting Quadrotor Platform

TLDR

Multi‑directional aerial platforms can fly in almost any orientation, and fully‑actuated multirotors provide independent control of all six degrees of freedom, offering greater freedom of movement than conventional drones, yet hardware designs remain fragmented. The authors aim to describe the hardware architecture and control framework of a fully‑actuated quadrotor. A prototype was built to validate the control scheme and characterize flight performance. The quadrotor can hover at a 30° incline and track position commands via thrust vectoring.

Abstract

Multi-directional aerial platforms can fly in almost any orientation and direction, often maneuvering in ways their underactuated counterparts cannot match. A subset of multi-directional platforms is fully-actuated multirotors, where all six degrees of freedom are independently controlled without redundancies. Fully-actuated multirotors possess much greater freedom of movement than conventional multirotor drones, allowing them to perform complex sensing and manipulation tasks. While there has been comprehensive research on multi-directional multirotor control systems, the spectrum of hardware designs remains fragmented. This letter sets out the hardware design architecture of a fully-actuated quadrotor and its associated control framework. Following the novel platform design, a prototype was built to validate the control scheme and characterize the flight performance. The resulting quadrotor was shown in operation to be capable of holding a stationary hover at 30° incline, and track position commands by thrust vectoring [Video attachment: https://youtu.be/8HOQl_77CVg].