Spinning Quadrotor: Hover Thrust Augmentation with Passive Lifting Surfaces

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23163v1
• Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:11:01 GMT
• Title: Spinning Quadrotor: Hover Thrust Augmentation with Passive Lifting Surfaces
• Abstract summary: This paper proposes a spinning quadrotor architecture that intentionally operates at a sustained yaw rate.<n>Preliminary hardware tests show a 22% reduction in thrust required.<n>These findings suggest that intentional yaw rotation, rather than being suppressed, can be exploited as a design mechanism for efficient and robust multirotor flight.
• Score: 0.802904964931021
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Conventional multirotor aerial vehicles actively suppress yaw rotation during hover, expending power to maintain a fixed heading despite the fact that yaw regulation is not required for force balance or altitude control. This paper challenges that paradigm by proposing a spinning quadrotor architecture that intentionally operates at a sustained yaw rate, converting power traditionally spent on yaw regulation into useful aerodynamic effects. A dynamic model of the spinning quadrotor is developed, analysis for low Re range is conducted to choose an airfoil for lifting surfaces. Preliminary hardware tests show a 22% reduction in thrust required. These findings suggest that intentional yaw rotation, rather than being suppressed, can be exploited as a design mechanism for efficient and robust multirotor flight.

Related papers

• Direct Rotor Thrust Sensing and Feedback Control for Disturbance Rejection of Multirotors Using Load-cells [0.8399688944263844]
  Gust disturbances, dynamic vertical inflow and ground effect are key adverse aerodynamic phenomena that induce variations in the forces acting on a multirotor.<n> Miniature rotorcraft typically rely on simplified modelling of such effects to compute adjustments in thrust to counteract these forces.<n>This paper presents a new approach by measuring the instantaneous force of the rotors directly at the point of generation using load-cells and implementing high-speed control to accurately track the desired thrust.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-11T03:30:44Z)
• FLOAT Drone for Physical Interaction: Lateral Airflow Reduction, Wrench Modeling, and Adaptive Control [4.5429661185092085]
  This article presents FLOAT Drone, a fully actuated UAV with servo-driven control surfaces for close-proximity physical interaction.<n>A force-matched computational fluid dynamics (CFD) comparison with a tilted-rotor alternative quantifies the reduction in target-facing lateral airflow.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-05T12:14:43Z)
• U-Joint CAAMS: Experimental Evaluation of a Universal-Joint Continuum Manipulator for Aerial Manipulation [36.94429692322632]
  The proposed design uses a tubular backbone with spring-reinforced universal joints and an integrated conduit for internal routing and fluid delivery.<n>Under peak downwash, the proposed design reduces mean error by 2.5-4x in yaw, 2-45x in y-axis, and up to 5x in roll compared to the NiTi-backbone design.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-03T13:38:40Z)
• A Multimodal Tiltwing Framework for Bioinspired Aerial Robots [0.7734726150561088]
  Tailless flapping-wing micro-aerial vehicles (FWMAVs) mimic the impressive flight performance of hummingbirds.<n>Existing designs are still limited and purpose-built with a restricted flight envelope and poor endurance.<n>We propose an adaptable tiltwing framework enabling bioinspired aerial robots to switch between hovering flight, high-speed directional flight, and energy-efficient flight.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-20T13:59:36Z)
• HoLoArm: Deformable Arms for Collision-Tolerant Quadrotor Flight [46.42648821424623]
  We present HoLoArm, a quadrotor with compliant arms inspired by the nodus structure of dragonfly wings.<n>Results demonstrate that HoLoArm can passively deform in any direction, including axial one, and recover within 0.3-0.6 s depending on the direction and level of the impact.<n>Drone can survive collisions at speeds up to 7.6 m/s and carry a 540 g payload while maintaining stable flight.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-25T12:37:18Z)
• Aero-World: Action-Conditioned Aerial Video Generation from Inertial Controls [57.166020875486474]
  We propose textbfAero-World, a method for converting a pretrained image-to-video diffusion model into a controllable aerial video generator.<n>A frozen latent-space Physics Probe, trained independently on real video--IMU pairs, provides differentiable inertial-consistency supervision during LoRA finetuning.<n>On AeroBench, Aero-World improves mean AAS from 57.7 to 63.6 over action-only finetuning and gives a stronger quality-control trade-off than AirScape.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-19T12:02:17Z)
• ASCENT: Transformer-Based Aircraft Trajectory Prediction in Non-Towered Terminal Airspace [54.94692733670454]
  ASCENT is a lightweight transformer-based model for multi-modal 3D aircraft trajectory forecasting.<n>It integrates domain-aware 3D coordinate normalization and parameterized predictions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-17T14:16:10Z)
• Dynamic Modeling and Attitude Control of a Reaction-Wheel-Based Low-Gravity Bipedal Hopper [0.0]
  hopping locomotion offers high energy efficiency but is prone to mid-flight attitude instability.<n>This paper presents an underactuated bipedal hopping robot that employs an internal reaction wheel to regulate body posture.<n>The proposed framework is evaluated in MuJoCo-based simulations under lunar gravity conditions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-11T11:35:21Z)
• A 26-Gram Butterfly-Inspired Robot Achieving Autonomous Tailless Flight [61.21669716392821]
  textitAirPulse is a 26-gram butterfly-inspired robot that achieves the first onboard, closed-loop controlled flight for a tailless two-winged platform at this scale.<n>It replicates key biomechanical traits of butterfly flight, utilizing low-aspect-ratio, compliant carbon-fiber-reinforced wings and low-frequency flapping that reproduces characteristic biological body undulations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-06T15:58:50Z)
• Wake Vectoring for Efficient Morphing Flight [1.6799377888527687]
  We introduce a passive wake vectoring mechanism that recovers lost thrust during morphing.<n>This solution achieves up to a 40% recovery of vertical thrust in configurations where no useful thrust would otherwise be produced.<n>Our findings highlight a new direction for morphing aerial robot design, where passive aerodynamic structures, inspired by thrust vectoring in rockets and aircraft, enable efficient, agile flight without added mechanical complexity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-04T19:31:17Z)
• Physics-informed Neural-operator Predictive Control for Drag Reduction in Turbulent Flows [109.99020160824553]
  We propose an efficient deep reinforcement learning framework for modeling and control of turbulent flows.<n>It is model-based RL for predictive control (PC), where both the policy and the observer models for turbulence control are learned jointly.<n>We find that PINO-PC achieves a drag reduction of 39.0% under a bulk-velocity Reynolds number of 15,000, outperforming previous fluid control methods by more than 32%.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-10-03T00:18:26Z)
• Neural-Fly Enables Rapid Learning for Agile Flight in Strong Winds [96.74836678572582]
  We present a learning-based approach that allows rapid online adaptation by incorporating pretrained representations through deep learning. Neural-Fly achieves precise flight control with substantially smaller tracking error than state-of-the-art nonlinear and adaptive controllers.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-05-13T21:55:28Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.