The Phoenix Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) developments represent an appealing research area due to its wide range application field. In terms of military application it might be mentioned: hostile zone reconnaissance, hazardous biological or chemical agent detection, etc. Within civilian field, we can cite the natural disaster support,assistance for earth science research, agricultural support, etc.
Conventional tiltrotor vehicles, such as the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, are mechanically complex systems since it employs a swashplate and differential rotor tilting to control pitch and yaw, respectively. This represents a drawback in terms of maintenance and replacement cost. Moreover, these vehicles may not be a handy tool for repetitive test flights due to its crash vulnerability. For these reasons we propose a configuration, called Phoenix UAV, which copes with the pitch-yaw motion using a simpler mechanical system based on rotors (noncyclic propellers) tilting.
This paper describes the first stage of an undergoing project to develop an aircraft that blends the vertical lift capability of a helicopter with the horizontal flight performance of an airplane. This kind of vehicles does not requires a run-way or an auxiliary launch/recovering device, such as catapultes or parachutes, because of its vertical take-off/landing capabilities.
In Gress [2002] and Gress [2003] the author proposes and implements a relative complex configuration to carry out hover flight taking advantage of the gyroscopic effect provided by the tilting rotors. It is worth pointing up that driving the pitch angle, represents a challenge because the contribution of gyroscopic-based on torque is not strong enough to cope with the pitch dynamics. In Kendoul et al. [2002] the authors present the mathematical model and simulation results of a backstepping algorithm in order to stabilize a tilt-rotor vehicle inspired by Gress’s mechanism.
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| Phoenix UAV |
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