In this work, a computationally efficient and high-precision nonlinear aerodynamic configuration analysis method is presented for both design optimization and mathematical modeling of small unmanned aerial vehicles. First, we have developed a novel nonlinear lifting line method which (a) provides very good match for the pre- and post-stall aerodynamic behavior in comparison to experiments and computationally

Quad-Plane UAV(quadrotor fixed-wing hybrid vertical take-off and landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) is vulnerable to wind disturbance in quadrotor mode, and the performance of the electric quadrotor system directly affects its wind disturbance rejection performance. To study and optimize the wind disturbance rejection performance of the electric quadrotor system of Quad-Plane precisely and efficiently

Drones designed for racing usually feature powerful miniaturised electronics embedded in fairly light and strong geometric composite structures. The main objective of this article is to analyse the behaviour of various models of racing drones and their geometrical structures (airframes). Two approaches have been made: (i) an analysis of the information collected by a set of speed and time sensors located

With the rapid development of drones, many problems have arisen, such as invasion of privacy and endangering security. Inspired by biology, in order to achieve effective detection and robust tracking of small targets such as unmanned aerial vehicles, a binocular vision detection system is designed. The system is composed of long focus and wide-angle dual cameras, servo pan tilt, and dual processors

An assessment of 3D-printed span-change structures is presented for determining suitability of the technology to small unmanned aerial vehicles. Materials and manufacturing technologies were used with an emphasis on near term applicability with design trades between the aerodynamic performance and structural response. Aerodynamic performance was assessed on three wind tunnel models varying span (432

To investigate how an unmanned air vehicle can detect manned aircraft with a single microphone, an audio data set is created in which unmanned air vehicle ego-sound and recorded aircraft sound are mixed together. A convolutional neural network is used to perform air traffic detection. Due to restrictions on flying unmanned air vehicles close to aircraft, the data set has to be artificially produced

Flapping wing deformation influences the aerodynamics of insect flight. This deformation is dictated by the dynamical properties of the insect wing, particularly its vibration spectra and mode shapes. However, researchers have not yet developed artificial insect wings with vibration spectra and mode shapes that are identical to their biological counterparts. The goal of the present work is to develop

This paper presents user needs and preferences gathered prior to the development of an indoor remotely piloted air system. A literature review was carried out to analyse previous studies about the involvement of users in the design of indoor unmanned aerial vehicles. Subsequently, the results of these user needs obtained from three focus groups held in European countries (Belgium, Spain and United

Bionic micro aerial vehicles have become popular because of their high thrust efficiency and deceptive appearances. Leading edge or trailing edge devices (such as slots or flaps) are often used to improve the flight performance. Birds in nature also have leading-edge devices, known as the alula that can improve their flight performance at large angles of attack. In the present study, the aerodynamic

This paper presents a novel collision-free navigation system for the unmanned aerial vehicle based on point clouds that outperform compared to baseline methods, enabling high-speed flights in cluttered environments, such as forests or many indoor industrial plants. The algorithm takes the point cloud information from physical sensors (e.g. lidar, depth camera) and then converts it to an occupied map

In this work, we present a novel design for vertical surface contact using a two degree of freedom robotic arm attached to a Micro Air Vehicle. To achieve this, we propose a controller based on a Gain-Scheduled Proportional–Integral–Derivative approach. In previous works, the Gain-Scheduled Proportional–Integral–Derivative method was used to control the attitude of the Micro Air Vehicle, thus mitigating

The papers in this special edition were drawn from the 10th IMAV Conference and Competition held at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, in November 2018. IMAV 2018 drew teams and authors from Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States of America and the Netherlands. It followed a strong tradition

Recently, the concept of Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) has seen an increasing adoption as an attitude control method for a variety of aircraft configurations. The reasons for this are good stability and robustness properties, moderate computation requirements and low requirements on modeling fidelity. While previous work [1] investigated the robust stability properties of INDI, the

This paper presents the design details and flight tests validation of printed circuit board fabricated micro gliders. The purpose of the micro glider is to be launched from a super pressure balloon...

This paper presents an algorithm based on fuzzy theory for the formation flight of the multi-quadrotors. For this purpose, the mathematical model of N-quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles is presente...

This study investigates the wing deformation of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle (MAV) in climbing and forward flight conditions. A measurement setup was developed that maintains adequate viewing axes of the wings for all pitch angles. Recordings of a high-speed camera pair are processed using a point tracking algorithm, allowing 136 points per wing to be measured simultaneously with an estimated

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) are suitable for many low-altitude operations in urban environments due to their manoeuvrability; however, their flight performance is limited by their on-boa...

This paper proposes an attitude control scheme for the Dove flapping wing micro air vehicle in intermittent flapping and gliding flight. The Dove flapping wing micro air vehicle adopts intermittent...

The robust control problem in attitude tracking of an unmanned aerial vehicle quadrotor is a challenging task due to strong parametric uncertainties, large nonlinearities and high couplings in flig...

In this work, we address the problem of UAV detection flying nearby another UAV. Usually, computer vision could be used to face this problem by placing cameras onboard the patrolling UAV. However, ...

This paper presents experimental results on the relation between forward airspeed, pitch angle, and power consumption of a quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle. The quadcopter consists of an intercha...

Micro air vehicles with transitioning flight capabilities, or simply hybrid micro air vehicles, combine the beneficial features of fixed-wing configurations, in terms of endurance, with vertical ta...

In this paper, the bio-inspired blade motion is introduced to improve the propulsive performance of nano rotor at an ultra-low Reynolds number. However, the complex flow interacts with the flexible...

High-fidelity large eddy simulation is carried out for the flow field around a NACA-0012 aerofoil at Reynolds number of 9 × 10 4 , Mach number of 0.4, and various angles of attack around the onset of stall. The laminar separation bubble is formed on the suction surface of the aerofoil and is constituted by the reattached shear layer. At these conditions, the laminar separation bubble is unstable and

In the present study, flow field around rigid flat plate wings executing main flapping motion has been studied using phase-locked two-dimensional particle image velocimetry measurements. Experiments have been conducted in water as a fluid medium for an asymmetric upper–lower stroke single degree of freedom main flapping motion. Two different aspect ratio (1.5 and 1.0) rectangular wings at 1.5 and 2

This paper provides a fundamental understanding of the unsteady fluid-dynamic phenomena on a cycloidal rotor blade operating at ultra-low Reynolds numbers (Re ∼ 18,000) by utilizing a combination of instantaneous blade force and flowfield measurements. The dynamic blade force coefficients were almost double the static ones, indicating the role of dynamic stall. For the dynamic case, the blade lift

It has been a challenge to simulate flexible flapping wings or other three-dimensional problems involving strong fluid–structure interactions. Solving a unified fluid–solid system in a monolithic manner improves both numerical stability and efficiency. The current algorithm considered a three-dimensional extension of an earlier work which formulated two-dimensional fluid–structure interaction monolithically

Recent advances in multi-rotor vehicle control and miniaturization of hardware, sensing, and battery technologies have enabled cheap, practical design of micro air vehicles for civilian and hobby applications. In parallel, several applications are being envisioned that bring together a swarm of multiple networked micro air vehicles to accomplish large tasks in coordination. However, it is still very

Long flight durations are highly desirable to expand mission capabilities for unmanned air systems and autonomous applications in particular. Flapping wing aerial vehicles are unmanned air system platforms offering several performance advantages over fixed wing and rotorcraft platforms, but are unable to reach comparable flight times when powered by batteries. One solution to this problem has been

Hovering flapping wing flight is intrinsically unstable in most cases and requires active flight stabilization mechanisms. This paper explores the passive stability enhancement with the addition of top and bottom sails, and the capability to predict the stability from a very simple model decoupling the roll and pitch axes. The various parameters involved in the dynamical model are evaluated from experiments

This paper presents the design process and experimental results of a brand new flapping and trailing edge control mechanism for a flapping wing micro air vehicle. The flapping mechanism, whose main components are fabricated from string, is suggested and optimized further by a modified pattern search method. The trailing edge control mechanisms for pitching and rolling moments are designed to be attached

This short paper introduces a new concept of rotor where the blades undergo a periodic surging motion in the rotor disk plane. It is shown that the unsteady actuation induces aerodynamic phenomenon that can enhance both rotor thrust and efficiency, depending on the amplitude and frequency of actuation. In particular, the increase in aerodynamic performance is found to correlate with the development

This paper aims to investigate the aerodynamics including the global performance and flow characteristics of a long-shrouded contra-rotating rotor by developing a full 3D RANS computation. Through validations by current experiments on the same shrouded contra-rotating rotor, the computation using sliding mesh method and the computational zone with an extended nozzle downstream flow field effectively

Despite significant interest in tailless flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle designs, tailed configurations are often favoured, as they offer many benefits, such as static stability and a simpler control strategy, separating wing and tail control. However, the tail aerodynamics are highly complex due to the interaction between the unsteady wing wake and tail, which is generally not modelled explicitly

This paper presents the experimental studies of the efficiency of open and ducted contra-rotating propeller systems operating in the low Reynolds number range. Eight off-the-shelf propellers were selected with a diameter in the range from 139 mm to 377 mm and seven ducts were built with the duct length of 0.28–0.53 the propeller diameter. Static and wind tunnel experiments were conducted. The maximum

The interference effect between the nano rotor and aerodynamic rudder was studied experimentally and computationally. Propulsive performance of nano rotor and aerodynamic performance of aerodynamic rudder were achieved experimentally. The disturbed flow field of nano rotor was also analyzed computationally to disclose the flow mechanics of the interaction. Results showed that the nano rotor has a great

The present paper aims to investigate numerically small amplitude oscillation of NACA 0012 airfoil at Re = 1000. The airfoil is sinusoidally pitching around the quarter chord point with 1° pitch amplitude about a mean angle of attack. The computations are performed for mean angles of attack ranging from 0° to 60° and for pitching frequencies of 1 Hz and 4 Hz. The effect of the mean angle of attack

The aim of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility use of an Micro air vehicles (MAV) in order to power wirelessly an electric system, for example, a sensor network, using low-cost and open-source elements. To achieve this objective, an inductive system has been modelled and validated to power wirelessly a sensor node using a Crazyflie 2.0 as MAV. The design of the inductive system must be small

A novel approach to detect micro air vehicles in GPS-denied environments using an external RGB-D sensor is presented. The nonparametric background subtraction technique incorporating several innovative mechanisms allows the detection of high-speed moving micro air vehicles by combining colour and depth information. The proposed method stores several colour and depth images as models and then compares

For an insect-like tailless flying robot, flapping wings should be able to produce control force as well as flight force to keep the robot staying airborne. This capability requires an active control mechanism, which should be integrated with lightweight microcontrol actuators that can produce sufficient control torques to stabilize the robot due to its inherent instability. In this work, we propose

This paper reports the development of an experimental airship drone powered by microwave as a precursor toward a large-scale airship drone for cargo transportation in mind under the collaboration with U.S. Federal Highway Administration and universities. Research work on a 2.2-m long airship drone powered by X-band microwave has provided sufficient data for the design and analysis for the operation

In this paper, we present a novel concept for robustly controlling the attitude of tiltwing aircraft. Our main contribution is the introduction of a wing-fixed coordinate system for angular acceleration control, which forms the basis of a simple and robust attitude controller. Using the wing-fixed coordinate system allows us to describe the actuator effectivity using simple approximations based on

The DelftaCopter is a tilt-body tailsitter unmanned air vehicle which combines a large swashplate controlled helicopter rotor with a biplane delta-wing. Previous research has shown that the large moment of inertia of the wing and fuselage significantly interacts with the dynamics of the rotor. While this rigid rotor cylinder dynamics model has allowed initial flight testing, part of the dynamics remains

Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using robotic flyers that promise for a more systematic and repeatable methodology. Here, we present a new flapping-wing micro air vehicle (FWMAV)-specific control approach

The work presented in this paper is part of a project called ARChEaN (Aerodynamic of Rotors in Confined ENvironment) whose objective is to study the interactions of a micro drone rotor with its surroundings in the case of flight in enclosed environments such as those encountered, for example, in archeological exploration of caves. To do so the influence of the environment (walls, ground, ceiling, etc)

Teleoperation of unmanned aerial vehicles is hampered by communication delay, which causes feedback from command inputs to take considerable time to be displayed to the operator. For an international internet connection, round trip latencies can reach 500 ms. The satellite connections used for military unmanned aerial vehicles can have latencies in the order of seconds. This delay presents a substantial

Inspired by talon of a predator bird, this paper presents a quadrotor with two 2- Degree of Freedoms (DOFs) compliant manipulators which could mimic bird perching and grasping. The symmetric configuration of the manipulators causes minimum shift in center of gravity and a minimum disturbance to the angular momentum of the platform during grasping and perching maneuvers. Thus, the dynamics of the manipulator

The wind disturbance rejection capability of a quadrotor fixed-wing hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle (QFHUAV) in the quadrotor mode is an important factor restricting its large-scale applications. In this paper, based on static equilibrium analysis of the quadrotor mode of a QFHUAV with a wind disturbance, a method for analyzing and evaluating the wind disturbance rejection capability of the QFHUAV in

A new flapping wing aerial vehicle (FWAV) simulation methodology is presented that combines models of the key subsystems: (1) the actuator, (2) the battery, and (3) the wings. This approach captures component interactions that are inherently coupled in order to realize system-level designs for optimal system performance. The approach demonstrates that coupling between wing sizing, flapping motions

High-speed flight in GPS-denied environments is currently an important frontier in the research on autonomous flight of micro air vehicles. Autonomous drone races stimulate the advances in this area by representing a very challenging case with tight turns, texture-less floors, and dynamic spectators around the track. These properties hamper the use of standard visual odometry approaches and imply that

Over the last 10 years, the use of micro air vehicles has rapidly covered a broad range of civilian and military applications. While most missions require optimizing the endurance, a growing number of applications also require acoustic covertness. For rotorcraft micro air vehicles, combining endurance and covertness heavily relies on the capability to design new propulsion systems. The present paper

This paper presents the modeling, simulation, and control of a small-scale electric powered quadrotor tail-sitter vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle. In the modeling part, a full attitude wind tunnel test is performed on the full-scale unmanned aerial vehicle to capture its aerodynamics over the flight envelope. To accurately capture the degradation of motor thrust and torque at

In this paper, the authors present the performance analysis of a Vertically Offset Overlapped Propulsion System (VOOPS)-based quadrotor in an aerial mapping mission. The dynamic model of the VOOPS quadrotor with the effect of overlapping propellers and the profile drag has been derived and simulated. A path-tracking mission is taken as an example for aerial survey. The controller used for this task

The lack of redundant attitude sensors represents a considerable yet common vulnerability in many low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles. In addition to the use of attitude sensors, exploiting the horizon as a visual reference for attitude control is part of human pilots’ training. For this reason, and given the desirable properties of image sensors, quite a lot of research has been conducted proposing

In this article, attempts are made to study the aerodynamic performance of co-axial rotors with different rotor spacings in hover. A custom-designed experimental platform with seven rotor spacings (z/D = 0.16, 0.19, 0.23, 0.26, 0.29, 0.33 and 0.38) is applied to measure the hover performance, i.e. co-axial thrust and power consumption, and to optimize the aerodynamic configuration of the co-axial system

We present a novel design of a tailless flapping wing micro air vehicle, which uses four independently driven pairs of flapping wings in order to fly and perform agile maneuvers. The wing pairs are arranged such that differential thrust generates the desired roll and pitch moments, similar to a quadrotor. Moreover, two pairs of wings are tilted clockwise and two pairs of wings anti-clockwise. This

The present paper aims at investigating the impact of an airfoil design on the propulsion system for a Martian rotary wing micro air vehicle. The main challenge for flying on Mars is the atmosphere’s density and speed of sound that are significantly lower than on Earth. It leads to compressible ultra-low Reynolds number ( R e c < 10 4 ) flows for a coaxial rotorcraft with a 30 cm diameter . Since those

IMAV 2017 has gathered more than 280 participants from 30 different countries including Asia, North, Central and South America, Europe, and Australia. The special issue IMAV 2017 includes a selection of the best papers nominated for the "Best Paper Award".

One of the major challenges of Mini-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flight is the unsteady interaction with turbulent environment while flying in lower levels of atmospheric boundary layer. Following inspiration from nature we expose a new system for angle of attack estimation based on pressure measurements on the wing. Such an equipment can be used for real-time estimation of the angle of attack during flight