A controllable flying vehicle with a single moving part

This paper presents the “monospinner”: a mechanically simple flying vehicle with only one moving part. The vehicle is shown to be controllable in three translational degrees of freedom and two rotational degrees of freedom. The vehicle has a single scalar control input, the thrust magnitude, and is controlled by a cascaded control strategy with an inner attitude controller and an outer position controller. The vehicle design is chosen based on two robustness metrics: the ability to maintain hover under perturbations and the probability of input saturation based on a stochastic model. The resulting mechanical and control designs are experimentally demonstrated, where it is also shown that the vehicle is sufficiently robust to achieve hover after being thrown into the air.