Aerodynamic design on the non-planar rotor system of a multi-rotor flying robot (MFR)

Abstract

An original multi-rotor flying robot (MFR) with six non-planar coaxial rotor pairs is introduced in this paper, compared with the other small rotorcrafts, the corresponding two adjacent face-to-face (F-F) and the back-to-back (B-B) rotor units are proposed as the research component to study the overall performance of the rotorcraft. The main characteristic of this novel configuration is that the attitude and translation dynamics are totally decoupled. In addition, the aerodynamic interactions of the rotor pair at low Reynolds number (Re) condition are totally new and different from any other MFRs. Indeed, together with the detailed aerodynamic analysis using the Euler-Lagrange method for the rotor system, the simulations in the presence of the much improved performance are performed to validate the aerodynamic models and test the effectiveness of the proposed rotor system. Combined with the benefits of the non-planar rotor pairs, the simulation showed a good aerodynamic performance.