A Comprehensive Framework for Modelling and Control of Morphing Quadrotor Drones

This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for control of an extended Morphing Aerial System (MAS) designed to achieve both mission flexibility and fault tolerance. The proposed quadrotor features a morphing configuration that integrates a two-dimensional planar folding structure with a tilt mechanism. This morphing capability offers structural simplicity and operational versatility, which enables stable flight in various established modes. The control strategy utilizes feedback linearization and a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), adapted to the system’s nonlinear dynamics and capable of controlling the MAS across various configurations (X, H, and O modes). An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is also incorporated for state estimation. To ensure fault resilience, we introduce the Y-mode configuration and a corresponding Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) architecture. Numerical simulations demonstrate that while a nominal controller fails immediately upon motor failure, the proposed FTC method successfully recovers flight stability, converging to the reference trajectory within 6.9 s. Furthermore, robustness analysis confirms that the system maintains operational integrity for fault detection latencies up to 0.40 s, demonstrating its feasibility under realistic sensing constraints.