Abstract
The fixed-wing vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) called the hybrid drone is a new type of aircraft that inherits the multi-rotor (MR) and the fixed-wing (FW) structure to use their strengths. Normally, the MR uses the forces and the moments generated from the four motors to drive roll and pitch angle while the FW uses the elevator and aileron control surfaces which have often complex structure and its difficult design. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a new design for the hybrid drone. By removing the complex components in FW, the angle controls of our UAV by using common basis on four motors of the MR structure are used. Furthermore, to improve the heading control performance, two extended side-motors are used. To verify the effectiveness of the hybrid drone configuration, the software-in-the-loop (SiTL) simulation is performed based on PX4 source, Gazebo simulation and ground control station named QGroundControl (QGC). Herein, PX4 is modified to design a flight control in which a desired trajectory from the QGC is set while the Gazebo is used to construct the dynamic model and 3D visualization for the hybrid drone. Numerical simulations have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the our design approach.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported from a major project, ‘High Performance Multicopter/Propeller Hybrid Drone and Flight Control Computer Development’ of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Republic of Korea.
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Nguyen, K.D., Ha, C., Jang, J.T. (2018). Development of a New Hybrid Drone and Software-in-the-Loop Simulation Using PX4 Code. In: Huang, DS., Bevilacqua, V., Premaratne, P., Gupta, P. (eds) Intelligent Computing Theories and Application. ICIC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10954. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95930-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95930-6_9
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