Simulation and flight experiments of a quadrotor tail-sitter vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle with wide flight envelope:

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 the presence of the forward speed, a wind tunnel test on the motor and propeller is also carried out. The extensive wind tunnel tests, when combined with the unmanned aerial vehicle kinematics model, dynamics model and other practical constraints such as motor saturation and delay, lead to a complete flight simulator that can accurately reveal the actual aircraft dynamics as verified by actual flight experiments. Based on the developed model, a unified attitude controller and a stable transition controller are designed and verified. Both simulation and experiments show that the developed attitude controller can ...