Adaptive control of a tilt - roll rotor quadrotor UAV

In recent years quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles are being used in various different studies. A regular quadrotor has fixed rotors. This inability to tilt its rotors lead to limited success in trajectory tracking due to controlling 6 DOF systems only with 4 input parameters. There are some studies on tilt rotor and tilt-roll rotor quadrotors that can compensate for versatile conditions. Some of these proposed quadrotors are able to hover and position hold at user defined desired angles unlike regular quadrotors. This study presents the design and control of a novel quadrotor system that can tilt its rotors independently so that it can adaptively update its rotor angles and speeds to compensate for more chaotic and realistic scenarios. After deriving the mathematical model, the designed control algorithms are explained by comparing with the latter studies´ abilities. Proposed quadrotor with adaptive control is compared with regular and non-adaptive tilt-roll rotor type multicopters, in various simulations. The results show that the proposed design has clear advantages in certain situations, especially when environmental limitations and hardware inconsistencies and inefficiencies exist.