Design, modeling and control of a novel morphing quadrotor

Abstract

In this letter, the design, modeling and control of a novel morphing quadrotor are presented. The morphing quadrotor can fly stably and accurately in the air while simultaneously undergoing shape transformation, regardless of the asymmetry of the model. The four arms can rotate around hinges on the main body of the quadrotor to form various topological models. The arms are not in the same plane, so they can overlap with each other. In the extreme case, the width of the morphing quadrotor can be reduced to the diameter of a single rotor to allow the quadrotor to fly through narrow gaps more easily. Reinforcement learning (RL) with an extended-state approach is introduced in this paper to optimize the attitude control law and enable automatic adaptation to model changes. A deterministic policy gradient (DPG) algorithm based on an actor-critic structure with four neural networks in a model-free approach is used to train the controller. Finally, a linear programming method named fast simplex algorithm is presented to solve the control allocation problem of morphing quadrotors in real time with affordable computational cost in this paper. The controller has been tested on our real morphing quadrotor platform and achieves excellent flight performance.