Experimental Verification of Cruise Efficiency Enhancement for a Lift-Wing UAV with an Independently Controlled Tail-Mounted Pusher

Multi-rotor UAVs suffer from a sharp decline in rotor efficiency during high-speed cruise, severely limiting their endurance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a vertical takeoff and landing configuration that integrates a lift wing with an independent tail-mounted pusher. The wing lift unloads the vertical rotor load, while the pusher thrust offsets part of the horizontal drag, thereby enabling both vertical takeoff and landing and efficient cruise. A longitudinal trim model is established to theoretically compare the thrust and power characteristics of three configurations. A modular validation platform capable of switching among three propulsion configurations is built, and an independent closed-loop pusher-thrust controller is implemented on an auxiliary computer without modifying the flight controller firmware. Comparative flight experiments are conducted along the same route under equal total mass conditions. The results show that the energy consumption per unit distance during cruise of the complete configuration is reduced by approximately 58% compared with the pure multi-rotor. Compared with the wing-only configuration without tail propulsion, the cruise speed is increased by approximately 27%, while the energy consumption per unit distance is reduced by approximately 19% at their respective natural cruise speeds. Speed fluctuations and attitude disturbances remain within acceptable ranges. By increasing the pusher thrust, the cruise speed can be extended to 25 m/s, breaking through the speed bottleneck of the no-tail-propulsion configuration; this upper limit is constrained by the thrust capability of the current tail-mounted pusher and propeller. These findings confirm the effectiveness of the synergistic mechanism of lift-unloading and thrust-sharing, demonstrate that independent pusher-thrust control is the key technology for achieving this performance advantage, and provide an experimental basis and an engineering solution for the design of lightweight, high-efficiency VTOL UAVs.