Autonomous hovering of a noncyclic tiltrotor UAV: Modeling, control and implementation

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present a mini tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle which is capable to perform hover flight. Unlike conventional full-scale tiltrotors, in our design we avoid the use of swashplate and we propose a simpler mechanical design which use only the tilting rotors to stabilize the vehicle dynamics. A detailed mathematical model is derived via the Newton-Euler formalism. A nonlinear control scheme, incorporating bounded smooth function, is obtained from the decoupled dynamics and applied to real prototype for controlling hover flight. 1