Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

Thrust vectored VTOL

Thrust vectoring is just a fancy word for changing the direction of the air that the thrust system is pushing. Whether it's by rotating propellers (like the Osprey military aircraft), rotating jet vents (like a Harrier), or changing the whole direction of the aircraft (like the X-Plane drone, which lands and takes off on its tail as a quad, and rotates to fly forward), the way to recognize a thrust vectored VTOL is that it uses the same thrust system to land and take off vertically as for pushing the aircraft forward during flight.

It's much more difficult to get this right during the design phase, from changes in the CG to taking into account how pushing or pulling an airplane through the air affects the airplane mode ...