Dynamics modeling and performance comparisons of two different rotor flying manipulators: Main-tail-rotor vs eight-rotor

Rotor flying manipulator (RFM) is a system composed of a rotorcraft and a manipulator. RFM possesses great potential applications and thus has got much concern of the researchers all over the world. However, controller design of the RFM is challenging because of the dynamical coupling between the rotorcraft and the manipulator perplexes the whole system model structure, so the flight performance of the system is more sensitive to some uncertainty factors. Generally, the rotorcraft system of the RFM can be a main-tail-rotor helicopter or multi-rotor aircrafts, which are of completely different flight characteristics. Thus, it is valuable to conduct quantitative coupling analysis of the RFM with different flight platforms. This paper is aimed at this problem. We first construct the dynamics model of the RFM system with respect to different flight platforms, respectively. Then, coupling force and moment are computed quantitatively, and the comparative analysis on the influence of the motion state on them is conducted. Finally, some conclusions are given to show different performances of different kinds of RFM systems.