Modeling and control of a vectored-thrust coaxial UAV

The purpose of this paper is to present a new configuration of a vectored-thrust coaxial UAV(V-co-aX). The main characteristic of this vehicle is that it uses thrust vectoring for control in hover mode. A functional description of this mechanism is given and the Newton-Euler approach is applied to obtain the dynamic model of the flight platform. A non-linear controller based on saturation functions is proposed for stabilizing the vehicle in hover flight. Results presented include those from flight simulation of this configuration, and from experimentation obtained in real-time during the autonomous flight.