Structure Design and Control of a Novel Tilt-rotor Quadrotor with Thrust Vectoring

This paper proposes a novel quadrotor with tilting rotors. It can generate horizontal acceleration due to the decoupling between the translational dynamics and the rotational dynamics in the x-direction. The vehicle can achieve motion in the x-direction while keeping the body horizontal. This ability, which cannot be achieved by traditional quadrotor, can reduce energy loss and improve flight duration. This vehicle can also hover in a specific attitude and keep its posotion unchanged, which is able to increase the field of view(FoV) of the gimbal. A novel control strategy applicable to this vehicle is proposed. The limited tilt angle of the servo is compensated by the attitude tilt of the airframe. Finally, the feasibility of the design and the effectiveness of the control strategy are verified by experiments.