Convertible UAV

With the advancement of modern science and technology, UAVs with conventional structures can no longer meet certain mission requirements; hence, the convertible UAV has been developed to make up for this and shows broad prospects for application relying on its varying structure. However, research is still in its initial stage, and Convertible dynamics modeling and controller design face several problems-. Quote from here.

This research is focused on:

  1. System modeling of convertible aircraft
  2. Control
  3. Platform design and construction


Some experiments


Platforms developed

Tail-sitter Convertible drone


Convertible drone with 5 fixed rotors


Convertible drone with 4 tilting rotors


Students

MSc Alejandro Flores Reyes. Master thesis: Design and development of an UAV with hybrid flight capabilities; Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, A. C; August 2018

MSc Jean-baptiste Audwin. Master thesis: Modeling, Control and Development of a Quad Rotor Tail-Sitter VTOL-UAV. CINVESTAV-Zacatenco; June 2016.

Related publications

PhD Thesis

Conception, Modélisation et Commande d'un Drone Convertible à Quatre Hélices Pivotantes; Gerardo Flores, PhD Thesis, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1107.1764, October 2014.


Book Chapters

Quad-Tilting Rotor Convertible MAV : Modeling and Real-time Hover Flight Control; Gerardo Flores, J. Escareño, R. Lozano and S. Salazar, Recent Developments in Unmanned Aircraft Systems, pp 457-472, edited by Kimon P. Valavanis, John Wiley and Sons, 2012, VI, 638p., ISBN 978-94-007-3032-8.


Journal Papers

Quad-Tilting Rotor Convertible MAV : Modeling and Real-Time Hover Flight Control; Gerardo Flores, J. Escareño, R. Lozano and S. Salazar; Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, vol. 65, no. 1-4, p. 457-471, 2012.


Conference Papers

A simple controller for the transition maneuver of a tail-sitter drone; Alejandro Flores, Andrés Montes de Oca and Gerardo Flores; 57th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC'18), Miami Beach, FL, USA, December 17-19, 2018 , to appear.

Control in the 6-DOF of the Quad Tilt-Rotor MAV. Part I Hover Control; Gerardo Flores, Israel Lugo Cárdenas and R. Lozano; The 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC’14), Dec 15-17, 2014, Los Angeles, CA, USA, pp. 6123 - 6128, 2014.

A Nonlinear Control Law for Hover to Level Flight for the Quad Tilt-rotor UAV; Gerardo Flores and R. Lozano; The 19th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC’14), Cape Town, South Africa, August 24-29, pp. 11055-11059 2014.

Lyapunov-Based Switching Control for a Road Estimation and Tracking Applied on a Convertible MAV; Gerardo Flores, G. Sanahuja and R. Lozano; AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control and Co-located Conferences and AIAA Infotech@Aerospace 2013 AIAA GNC, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 19 - 22 August 2013, DOI : 10.2514/6.2013-4940.

Transition Flight Control of the Quad-Tilting Rotor Convertible MAV; Gerardo Flores and R. Lozano; The IEEE 2013 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’13), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, May 28-31, 2013, pp. 789 - 794.

PID Switching Control for a Highway Estimation and Tracking Applied on a Convertible Mini-UAV; Gerardo Flores, L. García, G. Sanahuja and R. Lozano; in Proc. IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC’12), Maui, HI, USA, Dec. 2012, pp. 3110 - 3115.

Quad-Tilting Rotor Convertible MAV : Modeling and Real-time Hover Flight Control; Gerardo Flores, J. Escareño, S. Salazar and R. Lozano; International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’11), May 24-27, 2011, Denver Colorado, USA.