Classification and Structural Evaluation of Fully-Actuated Hexrotor UAVs

This paper presents a kind of taxonomy to classify and understand the acceleration characteristics of fully-actuated hexrotor unmanned aerial vehicles. First, two special classes of hexrotor structures are defined: symmetric-coplanar-tilted-rotor (SCTR) structure and parallel-coplanar-tilted-rotor (PCTR) structure. It is shown that many of structures from related research can be classified into the two types. Moreover, the acceleration characteristics of hexrotor structures can be analyzed and visualized using dynamic manipulability. The dynamic manipulability ellipsoids enable to evaluate the directional characteristics of the vehicle motion, and it is suited to the design of the fully-actuated hexrotor for each aerial manipulation task.