Design and implementation of an unmanned tail-sitter
We present the design and implementation of a small Vertical-Take-Off-and-Landing (VTOL) aircraft. The vehicle requires minimal additional components to achieve the hover capability and is thus very efficient in forward flight. We improve over the state of the art by using a single controller in all flight modes without using blending between hover condition and fixed wing controllers or gain scheduling. We present a compact airflow estimation model for VTOL airframes which rely on the slipstream across control surfaces for hover attitude control. Furthermore we show attitude and position control results in simulation. Finally we show outdoor flight experiments validating our simulation results.