Twisting and Tilting Rotors for High-Efficiency, Thrust-Vectored Quadrotors

Abstract

A mechanism consisting of twisting and tilting joints is introduced to provide omnidirectional thrust-vectoring capabilities to a quadrotor system. This mechanism eliminates mechanical constraints and kinematic singularities to provide full directional authority to all four individual thrust vectors. The presented system fully decouples position and attitude dynamics to overcome the intrinsic maneuverability limitations of traditional multirotors while maximizing thrust efficiency over its entire configuration space. This paper presents a mathematical model of the system, introduces a control method for position and attitude tracking, and presents numerical simulation results that demonstrate the system benefits.