Overactuation in UAVs for Enhanced Aerial Manipulation: A Novel Quadrotor Concept with Tilting

In this work we present a novel concept of a quadrotor UAV with tilting propellers. Standard quadrotors are limited in their mobility and ability to interact with the environment because of their intrinsic underactuation (only 4 independent control inputs vs. their 6-dof pose in space). The proposed quadrotor prototype, on the other hand, has the ability to also control the orientation of its 4 propellers, thus making it possible to overcome the aforementioned underactuation and behave as a fully-actuated flying vehicle. We first describe the control design of our actuated UAV, illustrate the hardware and software specification of our flying prototype, and finally show a future perspective for an interaction task between the UAV and the environment.