Development of Flight Control For UGS Tri-copter MAV

This paper presents our flight control development for the University of Glasgow Singapre (UGS) tilting tri-copter. The tilting tri-copter has the capability of high cruising speed by tilting the main rotors. The drawback of this design is that it causes instability during rotors transition and flight stability. As such, the development of a new flight control system is required to make this system stable. The first phase involves the designing & building of the tilting tri-copter for the investigation of its flight behaviour, and researching on different control systems to select the suitable control system for the tri-copter. The next phase is be to design the flight control system using the Simulink program. The final phase is to analyse and discuss the simulation result and compare with the test flights. There are discovery from the simulation result that after the main rotor had titled, the roll effect become less responsive and the roll mode will caused the tri-copter to yaw. This can be resolved by changing the design of the main rotor tilting into an independent tilting rotor system to improve the performance. With the new develop flight control system, it can use for future in deep research or even use it to combine with other controller such as LQR controller.