Design and Development of a 30 g Cyclocopter
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abstract
2019 AHS International. This paper describes the design, development, and flight testing of a mesoscale cyclocopter. Weighing 29 g, the present vehicle is the smallest cycloidal rotor-based aircraft at the time of writing of this paper. Unlike the larger cyclocopters, the prototype utilizes a lightweight (3 g) cycloidal rotor design with no exposed rotor shaft and cantilevered blades that have a semielliptical planform. To minimize bending deflections, the blades use a lightweight (0.1 g each) unidirectional carbon fiber.based structural design and are fabricated using a specialized manufacturing process. The cycloidal rotor design was chosen through systematic performance measurements conducted using a custom-built miniature three-component force balance. Based on experimental parametric studies, a four-bladed rotor and symmetric blade kinematics with a pitch amplitude of 45 provided the highest thrust and power loading (thrust/power) and was used in the final rotor design. The airframe is fabricated using a combination of carbon fiber and three-dimensional printed material. The attitude control strategy utilizes a combination of RPM-control of the two cycloidal rotors/tail rotor and thrust vectoring of the cycloidal rotors. The control strategy is implemented on a custom-built 1.3 g autopilot, which uses a closed-loop proportionalderivative controller for hover stability. The vehicle has been flight-tested and has demonstrated stable hovering flight after tuning the feedback gains.
