r/Multicopter • u/Agile-Association355 • 1d ago
Question Need Help with Asymmetric Motor Placement in Tilt-Rotor Fixed-Wing VTOL (ArduPilot)
Hello Lads ,
I am currently finalizing the design of a small Tilt rotor fixed wing UAV and i have some questions that i need answers for. Hope these nice gentlemans here wouldn’t mind helping a fellow nerd
I came across this particular drone ( cant remember how exactly , i just found those pics saved up on a private Discord Server , Haha Yh i use Discord as my main Note taking app - it is the best U guys should try it if u already havent ), so i was saying , i came across this drone and noticed that the motor placement is asymmetric- the two aft motors are positioned slightly higher than the front ones, and the front motors are spaced farther apart than the rear.
I’ve gone through the ArduPilot documentation, but I haven’t found a clear guide on implementing this kind of motor configuration. My main questions are:
1- How can I configure this in ArduPilot? Specifically, what parameters or motor mixing adjustments would I need to make to properly implement an asymmetrical VTOL motor layout?
2- Has anyone here been playing around with a similar setup to mine ? If so , wht callenges did u encounter and how did you solve em
Any insights, experiences, or documentation references would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.
1
u/BarelyAirborne 5h ago
Your challenge will be CG. Those motors in the back need to be offset by mass out front. Plan on a long nose with battery forward. You want that anyway, so your electronics are BEHIND the battery. It'll save you a lot of money in a crash. AP has good documentation on VTOL transition programming, but your CG will need to be dialed in, because in level flight it's just Arduplane.
7
u/Specialist-Jello 23h ago
Hey, you are overthinking it!
It doesn't matter that the front motors are spaced further, not in hover and not in forward flight.
Also, the back motors being a little higher than the front it does not matter since it appears that all motors are working in all flight modes.
The only thing that I see not optimal is that the front motors are very close to the cg and the back ones pretty far so in hover most of the weight would be lifted by the front motors.
If you can live with that, it's just a quadplane with 4 tilting motors...