Ground control of a hybrid tricopter

Optimizing energy consumption of Micro Aerial Vehicles is one of several problems that remains to be solved in the domain of UAVs. In a recent work, a novel quadrotor was introduced that was able, when possible, to roll on the ground thanks to a tilting propeller and caster wheels. In the following work, we build upon this idea with a trirotor helicopter where all the rotors are independently tilting. This grants our model a greater maneuverability both in flight and on the ground. We validate in this paper the flatness-based control approach by showing the ability of our UAV to follow arbitrary trajectories on the ground.