Modeling and Real-Time Stabilization of an Aircraft Having Eight Rotors

We introduce an original configuration of a multi rotor helicopter composed of eight rotors. Four rotors, also called main rotors, are used to stabilize the attitude of the helicopter, while the four extra rotors (lateral rotors) are used to perform the lateral movements of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The main characteristic of this configuration is that the attitude and translation dynamics are decoupled. The dynamic model is obtained using the well known Euler–Lagrange approach. To validate the model, we performed real-time experiments using a simple nonlinear control law using optical flow and image processing.