Design and Trajectory Tracking Control of a New Bi-Copter UAV

A pair of vectored thrusts brings versatility and power efficiency to bi-copter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). One common difficulty confronted by state-of-the-art bi-copter UAVs is the non-minimum phase nature, which puts fundamental limitations in the system and challenges the control. This letter introduces a new minimum phase bi-copter UAV that outperforms the conventional bi-copter UAV on attitude control with faster angular response and halved settling time. The comparison is made based on the optimal performance found by a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based attitude controller on SO(3). The differential flatness property of generic bi-copter UAVs considering servo dynamics is analyzed. Flatness-based trajectory generation and tracking control of the new bi-copter UAV are described in detail together with flight experiments demonstrating the performance of the bi-copter flying through a drone race gate following a four-dimensional trajectory.