Design, development, and flight testing of a tube-launched coaxial-rotor based micro air vehicle. (September 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Denton, Hunter; Benedict, Moble; Kang, Hao
• Is Part Of: International journal of micro air vehicles. Volume 14(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-09
• Subjects: design -- flight testing -- coaxial rotor -- micro air vehicle -- tube-launched -- thrust-vectoring; Aerosonde (Drone aircraft) -- Periodicals; Aerospace engineering -- Periodicals; Aerosonde (Drone aircraft); Aerospace engineering; Periodicals; 623.746905
• DOI: 10.1177/17568293221117189
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1756-8293

Abstract

This paper describes the development and flight testing of a compact, re-configurable, hover-capable rotary-wing micro air vehicle that could be tube launched for increasing mission range. The vehicle design features a coaxial rotor with foldable blades, thrust-vectoring mechanism for pitch/roll control and differential rpm for yaw control. The vehicle was stabilized using a cascaded feedback controller implemented on a 1.7-gram custom-designed autopilot. Wind tunnel tests conducted using a single-degree-of-freedom stand demonstrated gust-tolerance up to 5 m/s, which was verified via flight testing. Finally, the 366-gram vehicle was launched vertically from a pneumatic cannon followed by a stable projectile phase, passive rotor unfolding, and transition to a stable hover from arbitrarily large attitude angles demonstrating the robustness of the controller.