Modeling and Design of a Lift-Augmented Quadcopter
Franco M. Staub, Dai Tsukada, Shosuke Inoue, Christopher T. Raabe, Takeshi Tsuchiya · AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum · 2021
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-1988.vid In this paper, we discuss the modeling and design of a new VTOL aircraft configuration - namely the lift-augmented quadcopter. As the name suggests, this aircraft is a quadcopter that is augmented with small, lifting wings. However, these wings do not entirely support the aircraft's weight during flight. Rather, the aircraft flies like a standard quadcopter even during cruise, but with a portion of the lift being provided more efficiently by the wings. The advantage compared to other hybrid multicopter configurations is that this configuration requires no additional moving parts, or complex transition maneuvers. This paper presents two models to predict vehicle cruise performance with wing lift augmentation, and compares one of these models with an additional empirical model that predicts cruise power based on body forces. The results show that by adding wings, the cruise thrust can be substantially reduced in order to reduce cruise power consumption. When applying this to our quadcopter, this thrust and power reduction increases the range by 25% compared to the baseline quadcopter.