Construction of an autonomous hybrid drone
Subject description:
Convertible aircraft have nowadays two challenges: proposing robust controllers and platform design. In the last few years several convertible aircraft prototypes have emerged. There is a discussion out there about which is the best possible convertible aircraft configuration. Among them the most popular are tilt-rotors, tail-sitters and tilt-wing.
In this thesis we propose to construct a prototype consisting of 5 rotors, 4 of them oriented as a conventional quadrotor and one of them oriented for providing horizontal thrust. The transition maneuver is achieved by means of an intelligent system responsible to turn on and off the 5 rotors depending on system states and aerodynamics.
The abilities that the student will learn during this thesis are:
- Nonlinear control
- Robotics
- Coding
- ROS
- Git
- MATLAB
- System modeling
- Pilot planes and multirotors
- CAD modeling
- Construction of prototypes
The thesis is developed in collaborations with PhD, master and undergraduate students who are Lapyr LAB members.
Objectives:
- Collaboration with Prof. Gerardo Flores and student Alejandro Flores to propose a robust controller for the transition maneuver in the 6 degrees of freedom of a convertible aircraft.
- Design and construction of the convertible prototype
- Publish a paper in a prestigious international conference such as: ICRA, IROS, ACC, CDC, ICUAS.
- Attending the conference.
- A draft for an International Journal.
- The thesis
State of the project
Project started in 2016.
Students involved in the project:
Alejandro Flores
Publications from the team in 2018:
- A Simple Controller for the Transition Maneuver of a Tail-Sitter Drone. Flores, Alejandro; Montes de Oca Rebolledo, Andrés; and Flores, Gerardo. 2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Dec. 17-19, 2018, Fontainebleau, Miami Beach, FL, USA (BEST CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD OF CONTROL).
- Master thesis at CIO from Alejandro Flores
- Others publications in review.
Materials:
Fixed-wing aircraft; quadrotor drones; autopilots; altitude sensor; GPS; inertial navigation system; monocular camera; RTK precision GPS. All materials are available at the LAB.
Financial support:
FORDECYT project under grant 000000000292399.