Modeling and Control of a Tethered Tilt-Rotor Quadcopter with Atmospheric Wind Model
Rumit Kumar, Shubham R. Agarwal, Manish Kumar · IFAC-PapersOnLine · 2021
In this paper, we present the modeling and control of a tethered tilt-rotor quadcopter (TRQ). They can achieve long-endurance flights as the system is powered continuously using a taut power cable. The conventional quadcopters have already been utilized with tether applications. However, the tilt-rotor quadcopter has additional servo motors for achieving thrust vectoring and it provides better disturbance rejection during flight. The dynamic model and controller design have been presented along with the details on the atmospheric wind model. The results are presented by performing comparative numerical simulations of the tethered tilt-rotor system with the conventional tethered quadcopter (CQ) at variable atmospheric wind speeds. Statistical analysis is performed to compare the in-flight root mean square position error of the two systems. It is achieved using Monte Carlo simulations for 1000-test cases at different wind conditions. It has been found that the tethered tilt-rotor system is robust and provides better disturbance rejection as compared to the conventional tethered quadcopter even at high wind speeds.