Design and Implementation of a VTOL Flight Transition Mechanism and Development of a Mathematical Model for a Tilt Rotor UAV

In the last decade, the interest in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles and the implementation of different flight topologies have been justified mainly by a wide range of applications, both military and civil. The current work can be used for educational purposes and we present two approaches in this area. The first contribution focuses on the physical design of the transition system from a tri-rotor to fixed-wing flight mode, and vice versa. Therefore, this hybrid topology will have the vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capability as well as improved efficiency during the flight. On the other hand, the development and analysis of the mathematical model of the hybrid system is our second contribution. A linear controller is also implemented in order to experimentally validate the performance of the proposed design.