Autonomous Untethered Flight of Multibody Dynamics Rotorcraft With Cycloidal Rotors

Multibody dynamics models of a helicopter and two cycloidal rotor aircraft concepts capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) are constructed. The first concept aircraft is a helicopter equipped with two lateral cycloidal rotors acting as a replacement for its tail rotor and is named the Heligyro. The other concept is named the Quadricyclogyro and is propelled exclusively by four cycloidal rotors whose axes are aligned. The autopilot algorithm is implemented as a proportional, integral, and derivative (PID) controller and is tuned using a genetic optimization algorithm directly on the multibody models. Aircraft vibration and energy requirements are monitored and fed as penalty functions to the genetic algorithm. The time-domain responses of the aircraft attempting to follow mission paths of variable complexity obtained from the literature are studied. Overall, the tuned VTOL aircraft are able to reproduce the requested routes with good accuracy if a certain speed threshold is respected.