Design, Modeling, and Control of a Hybrid Quadplane With All-Moving Wings for Improved Flexibility and Efficiency

This article presents a novel compound aerial vehicle configuration called the hybrid quadplane with all-moving wings (HQWAWs), and provides a six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) flight dynamics modeling and nonlinear controller design for this new configuration. Compared to traditional quadrotors, the HQWAW add two wings on left and right sides of the quadrotor. Each wing is a single structure that can rotate to any angle of attack independently, which is referred to as all-moving wing (AW) in this article. The dynamic modeling of this configuration takes into account a complete description of flight dynamics, including wing aerodynamics and the dynamics of motors and propellers. A comprehensive nonlinear flight controller is proposed using model feedforward and state feedback for the HQWAW that supports the whole flight envelope. The proposed HQWAW configuration is compared with a traditional quadrotor with all parameters being the same except for the absence of the AWs. A set of numerical results demonstrate that the proposed configuration can obtain flight flexibility beyond quadrotors, while effectively reducing energy consumption.