The cyclocopter or cyclogyro is a 100-year-old VTOL concept that was conceived during the early 20th century. Even though there have been almost a dozen attempts to fly such a vehicle, mostly at larger scales, none of them have been successful. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to demonstrate the flight capability of the cyclocopter concept at MAV scales. A twin-rotor cyclocopter with a horizontal tail rotor was designed and built. The vehicle was controlled in hover by a combination of independent rotation speed control of the three rotors and thrust vectoring. Given below is the summary and some of the specific conclusions drawn from this study: (1) A twin-rotor cyclocopter (weighing 215 g) was designed, built, and successfully flight-tested in hover. This is first stable untethered flight of a cyclocopter/cyclogyro ever reported in the literature. (2) It is noteworthy that the present vehicle could be stabilized by the pilot in hover without any inner-loop attitude stabilization using an onboard processor. However, the dynamics of the vehicle was quite fast and, therefore, the rate feedback from the pitch and roll gyros to the motors was essential for the stability of the vehicle. The two crucial steps for the stable hover of the cyclocopter were proper trimming of the vehicle and careful tuning of the pitch and roll feedback gains of the gyros. (3) Even though it has been shown that a cyclorotor can be aerodynamically more efficient than a conventional rotor, one of the main drawbacks of any cyclocopter design is the fact that the rotor weight constitutes a significant fraction of the empty weight of the vehicle. Therefore, if this concept has to be efficient, the rotors have to be designed with lower weight. The present cyclocopter uses a lightweight (30 g) cyclorotor design, which produced thrust equal to more than three times its weight at a rotational speed of 2200 rpm, which is significantly higher than the previous cyclorotors but still much lower than the thrust/weight ratio of a conventional helicopter rotor. (4) A novel blade pitching mechanism has been developed for the present cyclorotor, which facilitated easy thrust vectoring by phasing the cyclic pitch through a servo and linkage arrangement. (5) The rotation of the cyclorotors was chosen such that the horizontal tail rotor produced an upward thrust to counterbalance the nose-up pitching moment produced by the cyclorotor, thereby adding to the total thrust of the vehicle. The tail rotor thrust constituted almost 19% of the total vehicle thrust during hover. (6) An uncoupled attitude control strategy was implemented, which used a horizontal tail rotor for pitch control, differential cyclorotor thrust for roll control, and differential thrust vectoring of the two cyclorotors for yaw. The control strategy was validated through flight-testing.


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    Titel :

    Design, development, and open-loop flight-testing of a twin-rotor cyclocopter micro air vehicle


    Weitere Titelangaben:

    Entwurf, Entwicklung und Flugtest mit offenem Regelkreis eines Mikro-Cyclocopters mit zwei Rotoren


    Beteiligte:
    Benedict, Moble (Autor:in) / Gupta, Raghav (Autor:in) / Chopra, Inderjit (Autor:in)

    Erschienen in:

    Journal of the American Helicopter Society ; 58 , 4 ; 042005/1-042005/10


    Erscheinungsdatum :

    2013


    Format / Umfang :

    10 Seiten, 19 Bilder, 1 Tabelle, 21 Quellen



    Medientyp :

    Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)


    Format :

    Print


    Sprache :

    Englisch




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    Benedict, M. / Chopra, I. / Gupta, R. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2011


    Development of a Micro Twin-Rotor Cyclocopter Capable of Autonomous Hover

    Benedict, Moble / Shrestha, Elena / Hrishikeshavan, Vikram et al. | AIAA | 2014



    Design, Development, and Flight Testing of a 70-Gram Micro Quad-Cyclocopter

    Runco, C. / Benedict, M. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2022


    Development of Control Strategies and Flight Testing of a Twin-Cyclocopter in Forward Flight

    Shrestha, E. / Hrishikeshavan, V. / Benedict, M. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2014