Design and control of novel tri-rotor UAV

Tri-rotor UAVs are more efficient compared to quadrotors in regard to the size and power requirement, yet, tri-rotor UAVs are more challenging in terms of control and stability. In this paper, we propose the design and control of a novel tri-rotor UAV. The proposed platform is designed to achieve six degree of freedom using a thrust vectoring technique with the highest level of flexibility, manoeuvrability and minimum requirement of power. The proposed tri-rotor has a triangular shape of three arms where at the end of each arm, a fixed pitch propeller is driven by a DC motor. A tilting mechanism is employed to tilt the motor-propeller assembly and produce thrust in the desired direction. The three propellers can be tilted independently to achieve full authority of torque and force vectoring. A feedback linearization associated with ∞ loop shaping design is used to synthesize a controller for the system. The results are verified via simulation. © 2012 IEEE.