Design and implementation of a Y-copter: Aerobatic version

In this present era of globalization, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has become one of the greatest innovations of technology due to its tremendous capability of rendering numerous tasks such as surveillance, data transfer, package delivery, instant medic etc. This paper illustrates the scenario of developing a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Radio Controlled (RC) 3-rotor UAV or on the contrary, a Y-shaped tricopter. A tricopter has two rotors that are spinning in opposite directions but there is a rotor left who produces torque that tries to spin the tricopter. Because of this, a rear servo was used to tilt the rear rotor to compensate this torque in the same manner a helicopter tail rotor does. The advantage of this solution is more yawing agility in comparison to multicopters with even amounts of rotors. KK 2.1.5 LCD board was used as the flight control board in which a host of multirotor craft types were pre-installed. At the heart of the KK 2.1.5 is an Atmel Mega644PA 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller with 64k of memory. Dynamic balancing was adopted for checking the stability by changing the Proportional and Integral limits (PI limits) on the KK board. Depending upon proper balancing and stability, Y-copter can change its flying gesture. The mathematical modelling including the dynamic equations, co-ordination and moment of inertia are illustrated in this paper. Moreover, the flight principle i.e. roll, pitch and yaw controlling mechanisms were also analyzed. At the eleventh hour, some indoor and outdoor flight tests exhibited the gesture of flying but balancing of the Y-copter was a great deal.