Design and trajectory control of universal drone system

*Çabuk, Nihat ( Aksaray, Yazar ) *Bakırcıoğlu, Veli ( Aksaray, Yazar )In this paper, a new universal drone design is proposed to be used in different applications. The drone system has a variable number of rotors from four to twelve with portable arms. As a comparative study, a conventional eight rotors (Octocopter) and independently controlled twelve rotors (Dodecacopter) configures are chosen for the proposed universal drone simulations to benchmark the trajectory performance. Besides, since the arm lengths can be changed in this drone system, the effect of different arm lengths on this performance is also examined. The comparisons are performed on both systems in five different working condition, such as without disturbance, with periodic disturbances and non-periodic disturbances. In the simulations, when the amplitude was increased by 100% under periodic disturbing effect, an increase of 69.7% and 47.6% was observed in the root mean square of the position errors of the Octocopter and Dodecacopter systems, respectively. Similarly, for non-periodic disturbances, an increase of %13 and %7 was observed for both systems, respectively. According to the obtained results, the octocopter system is partially more stable without disturbing effect while the dodecacopter system is more stable flight than octocopter systems as the disturbance effect increases...