Design and implementation of a quadrotor tail-sitter VTOL UAV

Abstract

© 2017 IEEE. We present the design and implementation of a quadrotor tail-sitter Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The VTOL UAV combines the advantage of a quadrotor, vertical take-off and landing and hovering at a stationary point, with that of a fixed-wing, efficient level flight. We describe our vehicle design with special considerations on fully autonomous operation in a real outdoor environment where the wind is present. The designed quadrotor tail-sitter UAV has insignificant vibration level and achieves stable hovering and landing performance when a cross wind is present. Wind tunnel test is conducted to characterize the full envelope aerodynamics of the aircraft, based on which a flight controller is designed, implemented and tested. MATLAB simulation is presented and shows that our vehicle can achieve a continuous transition from hover flight to level flight. Finally, both indoor and outdoor flight experiments are conducted to verify the performance of our vehicle and the designed controller.