Pushing the envelope: A novel hybrid vehicle design and real-time control concept

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly finding application in a variety of fields and as they do the demand for improvements in vehicle performance and control also escalates. Though a great deal of research has been directed to the field of unmanned and autonomous aircraft, it has been primarily through the lens of traditional fixed-wing aircraft. A number of applications exist, including a variety of surveillance and remote sensing tasks, for which the ability to hover is a strong requirement: Rotary-wing aircraft such as helicopters can fill this need but have difficulty achieving the required payload and mission duration goals and are sensitive to failures. Airships and lighter-than-air-vehicles have very high persistence capabilities and have low power requirement; but are difficult to control at low speed and suffer poor performance in windy conditions. This paper discusses the unique real-time control design for and development; of a novel, highly redundant hybrid UAV platform able to demonstrate precision hover and efficient translation for longer mission durations. The vehicle combines the, low power-long duration aspects of airships with the manoeuvrability and control of such hovering vehicles as rotary winged aircraft.