Fly without borders with additive manufacturing : a microscale tilt-rotor tricopter design

• Main Authors: Lee, Wilson Ying Jun, Mehndiratta, Mohit, Kayacan, Erdal
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: 3D Printing; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle; DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Prototyping
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/88562; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/45815
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper presents a lightweight and fully customized fabrication of a 3D printed microscale tilt-rotor tricopter for search and rescue missions in tight and uncertain environments where size, agility, cost, and manufacturing time could be of essence. Particularly, we utilize additive manufacturing for its advantages in low-cost customization of complex lightweight systems, and rapid on-demand printing and fabrication of parts to meet urgent mission requirements. Considering the mission requisites, the microscale tilt-rotor tricopter frame is designed and optimized in a computer-aided design software to compactly incorporate the electronics with minimal parts and weight. For the desired weight and durability, the parts are printed with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene in a desktop 3D printer. These methods produce a lowcost and agile microscale tilt-rotor tricopter weighing 532g and sizing 168 (radius) × 98 (height) mm that can be fully printed in less than 10 hours. Furthermore, we also demonstrate its tracking control in an indoor motion capture system environment utilizing a nonlinear model predictive control framework, which is implemented on an on-board Raspberry Pi 3 embedded processor.