An Experimentally Validated Model of the Propeller Force Accounting for Cross Influences on Multi-Rotor Aerial Systems

In this paper, we propose a model for the thrust coefficient of propellers that can take into account cross-influence between adjacent propellers. The aerodynamic interaction between propellers in multirotor aerial vehicles reduces the thrust they can produce. The influence between propellers depends on their relative positioning and orientation, which are taken into account by the proposed model. It is validated on measurements collected by a force sensor mounted on a propeller for different configurations of the adjacent propellers in a support structure. In this work, we focus on configurations with small relative orientations. Results show that the proposed model outperforms the traditional constant model in terms of thrust prediction on the data we collected, and it performs better than other models with fewer parameters, being the only one with less than 10% maximum percentage error.