Quad-cone-rotor: A Novel Tilt Quadrotor with Severe-fault-tolerant Ability
This addresses fault-tolerant control for UAVs, particularly in severe failure scenarios, though it appears incremental as an extension of existing quad-tilt-rotor concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of quadrotor fault tolerance by introducing a novel quad-cone-rotor design that allows thrust assignment along a cone shape, enabling severe dynamic failure tolerance such as total thrust loss. The result is demonstrated through simulation in SIMULINK, MATLAB.
Conventional quadrotors received great attention in trajectory design and fault-tolerant control in these years. The direction of each thrust is perpendicular to the body because of the geometrics in mechanical design. Comparing with the conventional quadrotor, a novel quadrotor named quad-tilt-rotor brings better freedom in manipulating the thrust vector. Quad-tilt-rotor augments the additional degrees of freedom in the thrust, providing the possibility of violating the normal direction of the thrust in the conventional quadrotor. This provides the ability of greater agility in control. This paper presents a novel design of a quad-tilt-rotor (quad-cone-rotor) whose thrust can be assigned along the edge of a cone shape. Besides the inheriting merits in agile from quad-tilt-rotor, the quad-cone-rotor is expected to take fault-tolerant control in severe dynamic failure (total loss in all thrusts). We simulate the control result in a UAV simulator in SIMULINK, MATLAB.