Reconfiguration control and motion simulation of tilt-rotor aircraft with multilinks

Multilinks rotorcraft has the characteristic of configuration transformation, which is an effective configuration design method to deal with the variation of motion space. The dynamic reconfiguration flight of Multilinks rotorcraft has a critical configuration interval that cannot be achieved because of the lack of lateral rotation moment cauased by motor co-axis under configuration change.In order to solve this issue, a chain rotor body structure with lateral tilting was designed, in which, the single arm was taken as the basic modular structure unit, the horizontal configuration was changed by rotating joints, and tilting vector joints were configured in the middle of the arm to provide rolling moment support. Based on the derivation of the kinematics and dynamics models, the control distribution was linearized by introducing virtual control variables, the control efficiency matrix was solved by using the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse, and the flight control law was designed for the full configuration transformation.Finally, experiments were carried out to show that configuration change is controllable and that the fully-actuated control stability of a typical configuration is possible. The simulation results show that the maximum error of axial angle tracking of attitude is less than 0.05° during all the typical configurations, in the condition of the whole configuration transformation it’s less than 0.1°, and in both cases, the position deviation can be controlled within 1 mm. The aircraft can fly stably when the configuration changes, which provides the necessary conditions for dynamic reconstruction and robust flight.