IDSC Tailsitter, agile and robust flying vehicle, Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

The IDSC Tailsitter: an agile and robust flying vehicle combining hover capabilities with efficient forward flight

This video introduces the IDSC Tailsitter which has been designed at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich.

The airframe is based on a Clark Y profile and designed such that for regular flight the pitching moment vanishes for zero flap angle, and such that the aerodynamic neutral point coincides with the vehicle's center of gravity. The objective of this design is to allow agile maneuvers for all flight regimes and to avoid flap angle saturation problems caused by large trim angles.

The vehicle is controlled by a global controller enabling recovery to hover from any initial condition. A cascaded control architecture is used: Based on position and velocity errors an outer control loop computes a desired attitude keeping the vehicle in coordinated flight, while an inner control loop tracks the desired attitude using a lookup table with precomputed optimal attitude trajectories. The attitude control algorithm is presented in the research paper "A Global Strategy for Tailsitter Hover Control", International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), 2015.

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