Introducing Scissor Mechanism based Novel Reconfigurable Quadrotor: Design, Modelling and Control

Quadrotors are increasingly used nowadays as a mode of aerial transport during relief operations, payload delivery etc. However, in addition to higher inertia, large size payload may interfere with prop wash (displaced mass of air by the propeller), leading to unstable behaviour. On the other hand, using different quadrotors according to payload size is not feasible either economically or operationally. Therefore, in this work, we have developed a unique scissor-mechanism based reconfigurable quadrotor which can adapt to various sizes of payloads. A robust controller is also proposed to negotiate the parametric variations stemming from the reconfigurations in the system. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is studied extensively via comparative experiments.