Agility-Based Comparison of Fixed-Tilt, Fully-Actuated Multirotor UAV Configurations

Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are fully-actuated offer improved dexterity for aerial manipulation tasks by decoupling attitude and translation. There is also potential for improved agility when the airframe design is optimised, leading to better disturbance rejection. This paper compares three fixed-tilt configurations by evaluating optimal designs for each under different design requirements: payload, flight time, and horizontal force during level hover. Three objective functions are used in the numerical optimisation: thrust bandwidth, horizontal acceleration, and airframe diameter. The results highlight the advantages of a heterogeneous rotor configuration, providing the best trade-off between agility and energy efficiency.