Transition characteristics for a small tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle

Research on the transition phase of tail-sitter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for trajectory planning and performance analysis. This study focuses on the analysis of the transition characteristics and path of a small dual-rotor tail-sitter UAV, including static and dynamic computations. The system input time delay and actuator dynamics are specifically considered during the dynamic analysis, and these actual physical properties ensure that the computation results are reliable and reasonable. The UAV steady-state limit is obtained through static analysis, which is also adopted to verify the correctness of the dynamic results. In regard to the dynamic analysis, several typical transition approaches are computed based on different initial states and optimization objective functions, and the different computations are applicable under specific task conditions. The off-line dynamic results of the transition path and actuator output sequence could also be adopted as reference values for the transition process during real flight. A comparison of the static and dynamic results illustrates the necessity of combining these two methods for UAV transition characteristic analysis. Furthermore, the UAV conceptual parameters related to the transition path are also studied, and the obtained quantitative characteristics provide feedback for the UAV conceptual design. (c) 2021 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).