Modeling and Control of QBQ-Copter: A Novel Morphing Drone

This paper introduces a novel shape-changing Quad-copter with a tilt mechanism. The proposed drone mechanism consists of two main arms. The bottom arm serves as the body frame and the top arm is allowed to rotate about the bottom arm along one axis. Tiltable propellers are employed for the top arm. The drone can be operated as a conventional Quadcopter. During maneuvers in tight spaces, it can be operated as a Bi-Quadcopter which is a Bicopter with the auxiliary thrust-tilting mechanism. The morphology-dependent dynamic control allocation is carefully designed. A nonlinear position controller is implemented with the double loop cascaded attitude control approach. The position control performance of the proposed drone is verified through the simulations.