This work establishes multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as viable microgravity platforms. Towards this, a vertical microgravity enabling maneuver suitable for multirotors, control and automation strategies, and techniques to enhance the performance of multirotors as microgravity platforms are proposed. Successful microgravity enabling maneuvers are performed to show the proposed control and automation strategies’ effectiveness using two multirotor test vehicles. Further, this paper shows that all the existing multirotors can be microgravity platforms and provide a method to calculate the maximum microgravity duration a multirotor can provide. Finally, experiments are conducted onboard one of the multirotors executing a microgravity enabling maneuver to observe the effect of microgravity on liquid level in a capillary and liquid meniscus shape in a glass cuvette. These experiments and the microgravity enabling flight tests demonstrate that multirotors can be turned into microgravity platforms. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the two UAVs presented in this paper are the first multirotor UAVs to achieve microgravity and the first UAVs—fixed-wing or rotary—to conduct onboard experiments in microgravity.

这项工作建立了多转子无人飞行器（UAV）作为可行的微重力平台。为此，提出了适用于多旋翼的垂直微重力操纵，控制和自动化策略以及作为微重力平台来增强多旋翼性能的技术。使用两个多旋翼试验车，成功进行了微重力赋能演算，以展示拟议的控制和自动化策略的有效性。此外，本文表明所有现有的多旋翼可以是微重力平台，并提供了一种计算多旋翼可以提供的最大微重力持续时间的方法。最后，在执行微重力的多旋翼机之一上进行了实验，从而可以观察微重力对毛细管中的液位和玻璃比色杯中的液体弯月面形状的影响。这些实验和能够进行飞行的微重力试验证明，多旋翼飞机可以变成微重力平台。据作者所知，本文介绍的两种无人机是首款实现微重力的多旋翼无人机，也是首款在微重力下进行机载实验的无人机-固定翼或旋转式无人机。