TiltDrone: a fully-actuated tilting quadrotor platform

Multi-directional aerial platforms can fly in almost any orientation and direction, often maneuvering in ways their under-actuated counterparts cannot match. A subset of multi-directional platforms are fully-actuated multirotors, where all six degrees of freedom are independently controlled without redundancies. Fully-actuated multirotors possess much greater freedom of movement than conventional multirotor drones, allowing them to perform complex sensing and manipulation tasks. While there has been comprehensive research on multi-directional multirotor control systems, the spectrum of hardware designs remain fragmented. This paper sets out the hardware design architecture of a fully-actuated quadrotor and its associated control framework. Following the novel platform design, a prototype was built to validate the control scheme and characterize the flight performance. The resulting quadrotor was shown in operation to be capable of holding a stationary hover at 30° incline, and track position commands by thrust vectoring