Development of a cross style quadrotor

Abstract

This paper presents development of a quadrotor UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) in a new configuration. In this work, a small-scale cross style quadrotor is introduced and its advantages as compared to the standard plus style, are highlighted. In fact, the cross style quadrotor inherently is capable of providing higher maneuverability by taking the advantage of using all the rotors for displacement in any direction. The quadrotor UAV development is presented in a few main steps: development of platform body, hardware and software design, and dynamic model derivation and identification. The platform body is built up based on a commercially available quadrotor frame. The vehicular avionics board is built up based on the NUS UAV group designed hardware system which in a compact and cheap design, it can provide and record all the navigation data, communicate with the ground station, and drive the motors. In the model identification part, the mathe- matical dynamic model of a cross style quadrotor is derived and unknown parameters are determined. Following that, static and dynamic identification experiments are conducted to numerically estimate the model parameters. A model validation experiment is then designed to illustrate the fidelity of the identified model. © 2011 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.