Abstract
Since quadcopters are hugely limited by their short flight duration, it is of significant importance to employ an optimal design for the structure of the vehicle in order to reduce energy costs. Tilting-rotor quadcopter designs have shown promise in high speed maneuvers. However, the effects of different structural parameters on the stability of quadcopters have not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, the effects of the Center of Mass (CoM) location and the inward tilting of rotors (dihedral angle) are analyzed. Additionally, a formula for the optimal selection of the dihedral angle based on the CoM position is derived. Furthermore, the effects of uncertainties in the dihedral angle on the quadcopter’s behavior are studied. The results indicate that increasing the dihedral angle makes the robot more sensitive to small uncertainties in adjusting the dihedral angle of different rotors. By considering these analyses during the design phase of a new quadcopter, a more optimal structure can be proposed to achieve the most efficient behavior.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Albanese A, Sciancalepore V, Costa-Pérez X (2022) Sardo: an automated search-and-rescue drone-based solution for victims localization. IEEE Trans Mob Comput 21(9):3312–3325. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2021.3051273
Allenspach M, Bodie K, Brunner M, Rinsoz L, Taylor Z, Kamel M, Siegwart R, Nieto J (2020) Design and optimal control of a tiltrotor micro-aerial vehicle for efficient omnidirectional flight. Int J Robot Res 39(10–11):1305–1325. https://doi.org/10.1177/0278364920943654
Badr S, Mehrez O, Kabeel AE (2019) A design modification for a quadrotor UAV: modeling, control and implementation. Adv Robot 33(1):13–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/01691864.2018.1556116
Bouabdallah S (2007) Design and Control of quadrotors with application to autonomous flying. Phd thesis, EPFL. https://doi.org/10.5075/epfl-thesis-3727
Colomina I, Molina P (2014) Unmanned aerial systems for photogrammetry and remote sensing: a review. ISPRS J Photogramm Remote Sens 92:79–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2014.02.013
Efraim H, Shapiro A, Weiss G (2015) Quadrotor with a dihedral angle: on the effects of tilting the rotors inwards. J Intell Robot Syst 80(2):313–324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0176-4
Elfeky M, Elshafei M, Saif AWA, Al-Malki MF (2016) Modeling and simulation of quadrotor UAV with tilting rotors. Int J Control Autom Syst 14(4):1047–1055. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-015-0064-5
Floreano D, Wood RJ (2015) Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones. Nature 521(7553):460–466. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14542
Ginsberg J (2008) Engineering dynamics, vol 10. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
HajiAbedini M, Zargarbashi F, Talaeizadeh A, Nejat Pishkenari H, Alasty A (2021) Design and implementation of a novel over-actuated quadrotor with variable dihedral angle. In: 2021 9th RSI international conference on robotics and mechatronics (ICRoM), pp 391–398. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRoM54204.2021.9663479
Hedayatpour M, Mehrandezh M, Janabi-Sharifi F (2017) In 2017 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems, vol -Septe (IEEE, 2017), pp 5116–5121. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2017.8206397
Idrissi M, Salami M, Annaz F (2022) A Review of Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Applications, Architectural Design and Control Algorithms. J Intell Robot Syst 104(2):22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01527-7
Kuantama E, Tarca I, Dzitac S, Dzitac I, Tarca R (2018) Flight stability analysis of a symmetrically-structured quadcopter based on thrust data logger information. Symmetry 10(7):291. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym10070291
Li H, Savkin AV, Vucetic B (2020) Autonomous area exploration and mapping in underground mine environments by unmanned aerial vehicles. Robotica 38(3):442–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263574719000754
Liu Y, Li X, Wang T, Zhang Y, Mei P (2017) Quantitative stability of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles. Nonlinear Dyn 87(3):1819–1833. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-016-3155-9
Mogili UR, Deepakm BBVL (2018) Review on application of drone systems in precision agriculture. Proc Comput Sci 133:502–509. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.07.063
Mohammadi A, Ramezani A (2020) An active actuator fault-tolerant control of a quadrotor based on analytical redundancy relations. Iran J Sci Technol Trans Electr Eng 44(3):1069–1079. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40998-019-00292-6
Pounds PEI, Bersak DR, Dollar AM (2012) Stability of small-scale UAV helicopters and quadrotors with added payload mass under PID control. Auton Robots 33(1–2):129–142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-012-9280-5
Rashad R, Goerres J, Aarts R, Engelen JBC, Stramigioli S (2020) Fully actuated multirotor UAVs: a literature review. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 27(3):97–107. https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2019.2955964
Rosales C, Gandolfo D, Scaglia G, Jordan M, Carelli R (2015) Trajectory tracking of a mini four-rotor helicopter in dynamic environments—a linear algebra approach. Robotica 33(8):1628–1652. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263574714000952
Ryll M, Bulthoff HH, Giordano PR (2015) A novel overactuated quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle: modeling, control, and experimental validation. IEEE Trans Control Syst Technol 23(2):540–556. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCST.2014.2330999
Santos MF, Honório LM, Moreira APGM, Silva MF, Vidal VF (2021) Fast real-time control allocation applied to over-actuated quadrotor tilt-rotor. J Intell Robot Syst 102(3):65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01411-4
Senkul AF, Altug E (2016) System design of a novel tilt-roll rotor quadrotor UAV. J Intell Robot Syst 84(1–4):575–599. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0301-4
Senkul F, Altug E (2013) In 2013 International conference on unmanned aircraft systems (IEEE), pp 1071–1076. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2013.6564796
Talaeizadeh A, Antunes D, Pishkenari HN, Alasty A (2020) Optimal-time quadcopter descent trajectories avoiding the vortex ring and autorotation states. Mechatronics 68(102):362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2020.102362
Ullah S, Mehmood A, Khan Q, Rehman S, Iqbal J (2020) Robust integral sliding mode control design for stability enhancement of under-actuated quadcopter. Int J Control Autom Syst 18(7):1671–1678. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-019-0302-3
Zareb M, Nouibat W, Bestaoui Y, Ayad R, Bouzid Y (2020) Evolutionary Autopilot Design Approach for UAV Quadrotor by Using GA. Iran J Sci Technol Trans Electr Eng 44(1):347–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40998-019-00214-6
Zheng P, Tan X, Kocer BB, Yang E, Kovac M (2020) TiltDrone: a fully-actuated tilting quadrotor platform. IEEE Robot Autom Lett 5(4):6845–6852. https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2020.3010460
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Zargarbashi, F., Talaeizadeh, A., Nejat Pishkenari, H. et al. Quadcopter Stability: The Effects of CoM, Dihedral Angle and Its Uncertainty. Iran J Sci Technol Trans Mech Eng (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40997-023-00733-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40997-023-00733-y