Disturbance rejection in multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using a novel rotor geometry

Abstract

This paper presents a novel multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The UAV, or OmniCopter, has eight rotors: four lift rotors in the typical quadcopter layout and four thrust motors that are orthogonal to the lift rotors and arranged as two pairs of co-axial counter-rotating rotors. The OmniCopter layout allows the decoupling of translation and orientation that is found in traditional multi-rotor UAVs. The OmniCpoter is able to translate in the plane orthogonal to the lift rotors without having to first roll and/or pitch. Testing is undertaken to determine the OmniCopters ability to reject disturbances from gusting winds. The results show that the OmniCopter has better disturbance rejection abilities when compared to the traditional multi-rotor layout.