Effects of High Fidelity Modeling of Multirotor Drones

This paper examines two different factors that will affect energy consumption for multi-rotor drones with more than four rotors. First, the choice of aerodynamic model for the rotor blades is examined. Two aerodynamic models, the blade element theory (BET) model and lumped blade (LB) model, are compared using vertical, roll, pitch, and yaw trajectories. The BET and LB models produced very different trajectories with identical inputs, especially in the vertical and yaw trajectories which differed by 87.9% and 52.5%, respectively. The BET and LB models also result in different energy usages with the LB model consistently predicting 36% more energy consumption. The second factor studied is the choice of rotor groupings. For a multi-rotor drone, different rotor groupings may result in different energy usages; two groupings are considered. The same four basic trajectories are compared. The results show that the two groupings have an energy difference of 4.7–4.9% for each of the roll, pitch, and yaw directions which implies that each grouping has a base energy consumption inherent to it. Then, possible energy compounding effects are explored by examining a complex trajectory. The complex trajectory yields a 9.26% energy difference between the two groupings but further examination reveals that the difference is due to differences in the final trajectory not energy compounding effects. Thus, it is concluded that the aerodynamic model and rotor groupings are two important factors that must be considered when energy consumption needs to be minimized.