TJ-FlyingFish: Design and Implementation of an Aerial-Aquatic Quadrotor with Tiltable Propulsion Units

Aerial-aquatic vehicles are capable to move in the two most dominant fluids, making them more promising for a wide range of applications. We propose a prototype with special designs for propulsion and thruster configuration to cope with the vast differences in the fluid properties of water and air. For propulsion, the operating range is switched for the different mediums by the dual-speed propulsion unit, providing sufficient thrust and also ensuring output efficiency. For thruster configuration, thrust vectoring is realized by the rotation of the propulsion unit around the mount arm, thus enhancing the underwater maneuverability. This paper presents a quadrotor prototype of this concept and the design details and realization in practice.

Xuchen Liu, Minghao Dou, Dongyue Huang, Biao Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Qinyuan Ren, Lihua Dou, Zhi Gao, Jie Chen, Ben M. Chen (2) __INSTITUTION_10__ Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai, China, (2) Department of Mechanical, Automation Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, (3) College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics, Astronautics, Nanjing, China, (4) Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China, (5) College of Control Science, Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, (6) School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, (7) School of Remote Sensing, Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China) · 2023