LAUSR

Abstract In this paper, a low-cost single-tilting tricopter aerial vehicle is developed with optical flow estimation for indoor navigation. A dynamic model is derived and experimental data is used to obtain the actuator constants. A CAD model is then developed and is used to obtain the moments of inertia with respect to the three main axes. A control allocation algorithm is also proposed to solve the problem of the number of control inputs being more than the number of actuators since the single rotor tilt tricopter has only four actuators (3 rotors and 1 servo). A cascaded-PID control scheme is then used to stabilize the tricopter in hover mode. The simulation results yield realistic control inputs and the outputs have acceptable performance. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is then validated with some experiments on the developed tricopter platform in hover.