Flight Testing of a Lifting-Wing Quadcopter UAV: First Results

This work presents a lifting-wing quadcopter unmanned air vehicle (UAV) prototype with vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capability. For the quadcopter to accelerate, it must tilt forward so that the propellers' horizontal components of the thrust force accelerate the vehicle. Thus, during cruise flight, the quadcopter remains tilted. This movement can be taken advantage of by including aerodynamic surfaces, a wing, and a canard, with a mounting angle so that they are aligned with the airflow when in cruise configuration, which can reduce the power required by the motors due to the additional aerodynamic lift. The aerodynamic surfaces, a wing and a canard, are designed so that their mounting angles can be adjusted and fixed before flight, allowing their performance in transition flight to be studied across a range of wing-canard mounting angles. The control system used is the same as that in generic quadcopters: a cascaded PID algorithm programmed and configured using the PX4 firmware and the QGroundControl software. In other words, it was not necessary to develop a specific controller for the lifting-wing quadcopter. Performance was evaluated through flight tests, transitioning from hovering to cruise flight over linear segments of 200 meters at cruise speeds of 9, 12, and 15 m/s, for six combinations of wing and canard mounting angles. It was found that, in the best-case scenario, the required hovering power decreased from approximately 1000 W to 600 W in cruise flight at 12 m/s, representing a reduction of about 40%.