Dynamics Modeling and Flight Control of a Dual-rotor Tail-sitter UAV

This paper focuses on the dynamics modeling and flight control of a tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which is composed of a fly-wing and dual rotors. The tail-sitter combines long endurance of the fixed-wing aircrafts as well as vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) ability of the rotary-wing aircrafts. The six degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) equations of motion are firstly developed. To achieve a good performance during the whole flight envelope, a systematic controller which is based on the vertical and horizontal Euler angles is proposed. The controller mainly focuses on the position loop of the vehicle at the hovering and horizontal flight modes as well as their mutual transitions. Simulations conducted in our newly developed Matlab + X-Plane platform are presented to corroborate the effectiveness and robustness of the controller.