Real-time stabilization of a small three-rotor aircraft

This paper describes the design and control algorithm of an original configuration for a small aerial vehicle having three rotors with fixed-pitch propellers. The mechanism of forces and moments generation is described and compared with other vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles. A mathematical model of the body-forces generation process as well as the 6-DOF (degree of freedom) krotorcraft dynamics is presented. A stabilization algorithm is proposed which takes into account the input amplitude bounds as well as nonlinear couplings in the three-rotor dynamics. The performance of the control strategy is shown in real-time experiments.