Design and Hover Control of a Tilt Tri-rotor Flying-wing Aircraft

We propose a novel tilt tri-rotor flying-wing aircraft, which consists of a flying wing and three tilting propellers configured at left, right and rear parts. In order to adapt to different flight scenarios, three flight modes are introduced and the aircraft can transform among them. To design position/attitude controllers in the hover mode, a 6-DOF dynamic model of aircraft is given. Then a cascade proportional-derivative (PD) controller is designed by means of feedback linearization and a novel control allocation method which is conducive to mode transformation is proposed. Finally, the controller is tested in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the controller.