Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Embedded Control

Chapter 3

Two-Rotor VTOL Mini UAV: Design, Modeling and Control ¹

3.1. Introduction

The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased during the last few years, due to the wide range of applications either military or civilian. In the military field, there are applications such as survival-kit delivering for troops, communication link with a ground station for information exchange, risk evaluation of sensitive areas or damage evaluation, just to name a few. In the civilian field, the development has not been at the same rate. However, we can find applications in natural sciences like volcanic study, weather monitoring and cartography; disaster assessment such as fire detection, search & rescue and supplies delivery; the surveillance of sensitive areas like ports, borders, power plants, railways and pipelines. The development of these kind of vehicles represents a multi-disciplinary project, involving areas like mechanics, electronics, automatic control and aeronautics.

One of the latest trends in the UAVs domain is the development of mini aerial vehicles, with special interest in those with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities which are required when no landing runway is available. Furthermore, mini UAVs are appropriate for special operations to provide visual perspective of “blind” locations (e.g. over the hill or around the corner). Mini UAVs can be easily backpacked and deployed; however, as the size of the air vehicle decreases, the design specifications ...