Dynamic Modeling for Bi-Modal, Rotary Wing, Rolling-Flying Vehicles

This paper presents a rigorous analysis of a promising bi-modal multirotor vehicle that can roll and fly. This class of vehicle provides energetic and locomotive advantages over traditional unimodal vehicles. Despite superficial similarities to traditional multirotor vehicles, the dynamics of the vehicle analyzed herein differ substantially. This paper is the first to offer a complete and rigorous derivation, simulation, and validation of the vehicle's terrestrial rolling dynamics. Variational mechanics is used to develop a six degrees-of-freedom dynamic model of the vehicle subject to kinematic rolling constraints and various nonconservative forces. The resulting dynamic system is determined to be differentially flat and the flat outputs of the vehicle are derived. A functional hardware embodiment of the vehicle is constructed, from which empirical motion data are obtained via odometry and inertial sensing. A numerical simulation of the dynamic model is executed, which accurately predicts complex dynamic phenomena observed in the empirical data, such as gravitational and gyroscopic nonlinearities; the comparison of simulation results to empirical data validates the dynamic model.