Skip to main content
Log in

Quadrotor with a Dihedral Angle: on the Effects of Tilting the Rotors Inwards

  • Published:
Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We study the effects of tilting the plane of rotations of the rotors of a quadrotor helicopter inwards, a structure inspired by the dihedral angle in fixed-wing airplanes. We show that this configuration yields effects that contribute to stability and reduce the dependency on velocity measurement which, in many cases, is hard to achieve at sufficient rate and accuracy. We present a theoretical analysis supported by simulations and by experiments.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. http://www.naturalpoint.com/optitrack/

  2. Abbott, I.H., Von Doenhoff, A.E.: Theory of wing sections: including a summary of airfoil data. Dover Pubns (1959)

  3. Blosch, M., Weiss, D., Scaramuzza, S., Siegwart, R.: Vision based mav navigation in unknown and unstructured environments. In Robotics and automation (ICRA), 2010 IEEE international conference on, pp. 21–28. IEEE (2010)

  4. Bouabdallah, S.: design and control of quadrotors with application to autonomous flying. PhD thesis, EPFL (2007)

  5. Bouabdallah, S., Siegwart, R.: Backstepping and sliding-mode techniques applied to an indoor micro quadrotor. International Conference on Robotics and Automation Barcelona, Spain (2005)

  6. Edwards, C., Spurgeon, S.K.: Sliding mode control: theory and applications. Taylor & Francis systems and control book series. Taylor & Francis (1998)

  7. Hoffmann, S., Waslander, G., Tomlin, C.: Quadrotor helicopter trajectory tracking control. AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference and Exhibit (2008)

  8. Sturm, J., Engel, J., Cremers, D.: Camera-based navigation of a low-cost quadrocopter. In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, pp. 2815–2821. IEEE (2012)

  9. Khalil, H.K.: Nonlinear systems. Prentice Hall (2002)

  10. Klein, G., Murray, D.: Parallel tracking and mapping for small ar workspaces. In Mixed and Augmented Reality, 2007. ISMAR 2007. 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on, pp. 225–234. IEEE (2007)

  11. Lucas, B.D, Kanade, T.: An iterative image registration technique with an application to stereo vision. IJCAI 81, 674–679 (1981)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Mahony, R., Kim, J., Euston, M., Coote, P., Hamel, T.: A complementary filter for attitude estimation of a fixed-wing uav. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2008. IROS 2008

  13. Mellinger, D., Michael, N., Kumar, V.: Trajectory generation and control for precise aggressive maneuvers with quadrotors. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (2010)

  14. Bristeau, D., Vissière, P., Callou, F., Petit, N.: The navigation and control technology inside the ar. drone micro uav. In 18th IFAC World Congress, pp. 1477–1484 (2011)

  15. Mahony, S-H., Cha, R., Hamel, T.: A coupled estimation and control analysis for attitude stabilisation of mini aerial vehicles. In: Proceedings of the 19th Australiasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (2006)

  16. Hamel, T., Mahony, R., Pflimlin, J.-M.: Complementary filter design on the special orthogonal group so (3). In 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2005 and 2005 European Control Conference. CDC-ECC’05, pp. 1477–1484. IEEE (2005)

  17. Roskam, J., Lan, C.-T.: Airplane aerodynamics and performance. DARcorporation (1997)

  18. Ryll, M., Bulthoff, H.H., Giordano, P.R.: First flight tests for a quadrotor uav with tilting propellers. In Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 295–302. IEEE (2013)

  19. Ryll, M., Bulthoff, H.H., Giordano, P.R.: Modeling and control of a quadrotor uav with tilting propellers. In 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 4606–4613. IEEE (2012)

  20. Noth, A., Bouabdallah, S., Siegwart, R.: Pid vs lq control techniques applied to an indoor micro quadrotor. In Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2004.(IROS 2004). vol. 3, pp. 2451–2456. IEEE (2004)

  21. Tayebi, A., McGilvray, S.: Attitude stabilization of a vtol quadrotor aircraft. IEEE Trans. Control Syst. Technol. 14(3), 562–571 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Trajković, M., Hedley, M.: Fast corner detection. Image Vis. Comput. 16(2), 75–87 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hanoch Efraim.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Efraim, H., Shapiro, A. & Weiss, G. Quadrotor with a Dihedral Angle: on the Effects of Tilting the Rotors Inwards. J Intell Robot Syst 80, 313–324 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0176-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0176-4

Keywords

Navigation