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Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have slowly but steadily emerged as a research and commercial hotspot because of their widespread applications. Due to their agility, compact size, and ability to integrate multiple sensors, they are mostly sought for applications that require supplementing human effo...

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Autores principales: Panigrahi, Siddhant, Krishna, Yenugu Siva Sai, Thondiyath, Asokan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8468980/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34577196
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21185987
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author Panigrahi, Siddhant
Krishna, Yenugu Siva Sai
Thondiyath, Asokan
author_facet Panigrahi, Siddhant
Krishna, Yenugu Siva Sai
Thondiyath, Asokan
author_sort Panigrahi, Siddhant
collection PubMed
description Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have slowly but steadily emerged as a research and commercial hotspot because of their widespread applications. Due to their agility, compact size, and ability to integrate multiple sensors, they are mostly sought for applications that require supplementing human effort in risky and monotonous missions. Despite all of these advantages, rotorcrafts, in general, are limited by their endurance and power-intensive flight requirements, which consequently affect the time of flight and operational range. On the other hand, fixed-wing aircrafts have an extended range, as the entire thrust force is along the direction of motion and are inherently more stable but are limited by their takeoff and landing strip requirements. One of the potential solutions to increase the endurance of VTOL rotorcrafts (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles) was to exploit the thrust vectoring ability of the individual actuators in multi-rotors, which would enable take-off and hovering as a VTOL vehicle and flight as a fixed-wing aircraft. The primary aim of this paper is to lay out the overall design process of a Hybrid VTOL tilt-rotor UAV from the initial conceptual sketch to the final fabricated prototype. The novelty of the design lies in achieving thrust vectoring capabilities in a fixed-wing platform with minimum actuation and no additional control complexity. This paper presents novel bi-copter that has been designed to perform as a hybrid configuration in both VTOL and fixed wing conditions with minimum actuators in comparison to existing designs. The unified dynamic modelling along with the approximation of multiple aerodynamic coefficients by numerical simulations is also presented. The overall conceptual design, dynamic modeling, computational simulation, and experimental analysis of the novel hybrid fixed-wing bi-copter with thrust vectoring capabilities aiming to substantially increase the flight range and endurance compared to the conventional aircraft rotorcraft configurations are presented.
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spelling pubmed-84689802021-09-27 Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance Panigrahi, Siddhant Krishna, Yenugu Siva Sai Thondiyath, Asokan Sensors (Basel) Article Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have slowly but steadily emerged as a research and commercial hotspot because of their widespread applications. Due to their agility, compact size, and ability to integrate multiple sensors, they are mostly sought for applications that require supplementing human effort in risky and monotonous missions. Despite all of these advantages, rotorcrafts, in general, are limited by their endurance and power-intensive flight requirements, which consequently affect the time of flight and operational range. On the other hand, fixed-wing aircrafts have an extended range, as the entire thrust force is along the direction of motion and are inherently more stable but are limited by their takeoff and landing strip requirements. One of the potential solutions to increase the endurance of VTOL rotorcrafts (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles) was to exploit the thrust vectoring ability of the individual actuators in multi-rotors, which would enable take-off and hovering as a VTOL vehicle and flight as a fixed-wing aircraft. The primary aim of this paper is to lay out the overall design process of a Hybrid VTOL tilt-rotor UAV from the initial conceptual sketch to the final fabricated prototype. The novelty of the design lies in achieving thrust vectoring capabilities in a fixed-wing platform with minimum actuation and no additional control complexity. This paper presents novel bi-copter that has been designed to perform as a hybrid configuration in both VTOL and fixed wing conditions with minimum actuators in comparison to existing designs. The unified dynamic modelling along with the approximation of multiple aerodynamic coefficients by numerical simulations is also presented. The overall conceptual design, dynamic modeling, computational simulation, and experimental analysis of the novel hybrid fixed-wing bi-copter with thrust vectoring capabilities aiming to substantially increase the flight range and endurance compared to the conventional aircraft rotorcraft configurations are presented. MDPI 2021-09-07 /pmc/articles/PMC8468980/ /pubmed/34577196 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21185987 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Panigrahi, Siddhant
Krishna, Yenugu Siva Sai
Thondiyath, Asokan
Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance
title Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance
title_full Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance
title_fullStr Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance
title_full_unstemmed Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance
title_short Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance
title_sort design, analysis, and testing of a hybrid vtol tilt-rotor uav for increased endurance
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8468980/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34577196
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21185987
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