Modeling and control of a small autonomous aircraft having two tilting rotors

This paper presents recent work concerning a small tiltrotor aircraft with a reduced number of rotors. After several attempts, the final design consists of two propellers mounted laterally. The direction of the thrust can be redirected by tilting the propellers laterally and longitudinally. A theoretical analysis of this mechanism proves its effectiveness and the experimental results show that this aerodynamical configuration is very promising. A model of the full birotor dynamics is also presented in this paper and a controller based on the backstepping procedure is synthesized performing also an autonomous flight.