Modeling and dynamic exploration of a tilt-rotor VTOL aircraft

In this paper we introduce and study a novel model of a Tilt-Rotor VTOL aircraft. The aircraft is structured as a blended wing body equipped with a tilting rotor (the propulsion unit) that gives the vehicle the capability of vertical take off and transition to a forward flight configuration. This model captures the main features of novel tilt-rotor aircraft architectures with more challenging control and maneuvering capabilities. We introduce a complex nine degrees of freedom model of the aircraft to explore the dynamics and the maneuvering capabilities of the vehicle. We perform an analysis of the equilibrium manifold of the aircraft (namely a parametrized family of trimming trajectories) and, as main contribution of the paper, we introduce a set of optimal control based strategies to explore the trajectory manifold of the vehicle in order to generate non-stationary and highly aggressive trajectories. In particular, we provide numerical computations showing how to generate a trajectory for transitions from near hover to forward flight.