Title: Design, manufacturing and testing of a tail-sitter UAV capable of hovering

Authors: Sandro Domitran; Marina Bagić Babac

Addresses: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Unska 3, HR-10000, Zagreb, Croatia ' Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Unska 3, HR-10000, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract: There are many different tasks that got revolutionised with the arrival of UAVs in the last couple of years. Most of them are solved either by using multi-rotors or airplanes, which both have some strengths and weaknesses. While multi-rotors can fly precisely and take off and land almost anywhere, they are not as efficient as planes as they are able to generate lift using wings. This work proposed an aircraft that is a combination of those two, so the strengths are preserved, and weaknesses eliminated. The built prototype is a tail-sitter aircraft which is mechanically the simplest VTOL aircraft type. It takes off and lands as a multi-rotor, and it is able to transition into fixed-wing flight while in mid-air. The outdoor experiments verified its behaviour while hovering, while transitions and fixed-wing flight are only verified using simulation. In addition, it was also able to perform a simple task using machine learning.

Keywords: ArduPilot; machine learning; PID; RealFlight; simulation; software in the loop; SITL; tail-sitter; transition; VTOL.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSA.2023.132116

International Journal of Sustainable Aviation, 2023 Vol.9 No.3, pp.240 - 261

Received: 17 Aug 2022
Accepted: 22 Jan 2023
Published online: 11 Jul 2023 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article