Development of a Novel Polyhedral Multirotor: A Dodecahedral Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

The use of multirotor aerial vehicles for indoor applications is attracting a growing interest. To this extent, a novel platform with highly manoeuvrable capabilities and a safe structure has been designed and prototyped. It has a dodecahedron shape with a propulsion system in the centre of each of its sides. Owing to this, its six degrees of freedom, namely the three translational motion velocities and the three angular rates, can be controlled independently, minimising the coupling between the translational and rotational dynamics which most of the multirotor aerial vehicles currently possess. The prototype of dodecahedral aerial vehicle, the G-Dodecopter, is a robust and efficient aerial vehicle with all the components on the inside of the air-vehicle frame, making it a safe platform, while maximising the airflow. The original controller designed for this aerial vehicle is a concatenation of a Proportional-Integral, a Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion and a control allocator using Redistributed PseudoInverses. The simulations have demonstrated a working controller that can control the 6 Degrees of Freedom independently in the ideal case, and the flight tests have shown a working system but with some challenges, believed to be due to the ground effect.